Rating: 
Summary: ONE PERSPECTIVE ONLY
Review: This fluently written book aims to offer insight into what makes the top companies tick and reach that level above and beyond being simply "good". Eleven such superstar companies are singled out according to 5 years worth of research -- Abbot Labs, Circuit City, Fannie Mae, Gillette, Kimberly-Clark, Kroger, Nucor, Philip Morris, Pitney Bowes, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo -- on the basis of 15-year stock returns. Which is one metric. It may be instructive to note that Gillette, one of the Great firms, is trading at the same stock price as it was in 1995, and went through a pretty lame patch of 4-5 years just recently until it was saved by a doyen CEO. Wells Fargo, despite its Norwest acquisition still remains no.5 in its category. We are offered the following insights about most effective leaders: - Best leaders are not high profile folk but subdued, humble yet focused people who get results. Sure, but same could also be said of the oppposite personality. Examples of vivacious/outspoken yet successful CEOs abound: Lee Iacocca, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Jack Welch etc. - Great leaders are supposed to believe in teamwork (Nokia's boss, Jorma Ollila, and his preachings of putting teamwork before individual effort are cited). Excuse me if this hackneyed mantra fails to tickle my fancies. Apart from the above insightful analysis, we are taken through a whole text of redundant spin on how companies need to focus on their "key profitability ratio" and hone it down to succeed. Advice of this nature that asks companies to focus sounds quite ordinary and unimaginative, so a parable from Aesop's Fables is thrown in -- the "HedgeHog versus Fox" -- a hedgehog knows ONE thing well and excels at it, while a fox runs around seeking many targets but never learns. We should of course be like the hedgehog. Firstly, this swansong of "focus" is painfully cliche. Secondly, it assumes that business context is stagnant, which is anything but the reality. What happens when Kentucky Fried Chicken runs out of favor with a populace that is becoming health conscious? Or, what happens when a new generation requires MORE than one type of jeans? (This put Levis into its deep market share woes as recently as the late 90s while Lee Cooper and Calvin Klein made significant inroads into the teen denim markets, Levis was caught sleeping with its errant strategy to focus on its 501s). I have difficulty believing that the book stands up to all its rave reviews. At best, this is just ONE perspective about SOME companies based on ONE statistic, the data for which were collected and analyzed POST-HOC (known as "posthoc bias" to those in the know). If you are expecting to come away with any pearls of wisdom about effective leadership or corporate success, you may be disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent insight but not a prescription
Review: Clearly this is groundbreaking work that starts with data to understand how some companies excel as represented by their stock market valuation. Unlike many other management guides, it does not find data (or worse, anecdotes) to support a theme or set of truths. Collins derived his principles from analyzing and observing the data. Many other reviews point out the high quality of the research and analysis that went into this book. It exemplifies thoughtful assessment of a lot of information. I will not try to recreate Collins' keys points as other reviewers have. However, I want to highlight a critical point that he makes in the introduction: The traits Collins identifies for "good to great" companies are not necessarily prescriptive. That is, he is not asserting that when you apply these principles you will necessarily produce a great company. This is an extremely important point when you begin to apply the principles. One must be very careful to understand how to follow his guidance should you be in a position to effect change in a company. I witnessed a consultant applying the first step, select the right people, way too quickly with a client. They were oblivious of the organization's social and cultural limits and strongly advised radical change in the management team. They were using the "good to great" principle to justify the removal of people who they thought were not "top notch" managers. Using Collins to support this action may not produce success and in this case could destroy the organization before they could begin to apply the other "good to Great" principles. No doubt intelligently using the guidance offered by Collins will help move an organization to higher performance. It is nice to have quality data and insight to support these principles. Perhaps, the traits of "good to great" companies are best used for predicting the valuation trend of individual companies. If you can actually get this type of information on a company, you might feel safer putting your money in its stock. All in all, I would like to see more business texts use Collins' analytical approach.
Rating:
Summary: Emotionally Charged Learning and Good to Great
Review: I have been in business for 25 years mostly as a top executive for Xeorx and then Intel. I consider it my obligation to continue to improve myself at every level in order to maintain my career and stay ahead of the internal competition. To me it is not just a credo it is a way of life and one that has served me well over the years and put three girls through college. Nothing has ever helped more than improving my leadership skills. My top two books this quarter are mostly bestsellers such as Emotionally Charged Learning by Eric Schiffer and "Good to Great" by Jim Collins. Emotionally Charged Learning taught me how to be a better "knowledge" oriented leader which gives me more power to have my employees better excel. Good to Great taught me to take another look at what really works. These books have been essential to me and my ongoing success.
Rating:
Summary: Good to Great to the Best
Review: This book asserts the value of the right people -- rather than just people -- as the greatest asset of a company. Good to Great is a book that explores the leap from mediocre thinking to extraordinarily positive thinking within a company. But have you stopped to think that "great" may not be the best possible standard. Are you settling for second best? In today's competitive corporate world, companies must strive to be their greatest, their best. I recommend Optimal Thinking: How to Be Your Best Self by Rosalene Glickman, Ph.D. as the essential resource to optimize the thinking and performance of individuals and corporations. We can't achieve peak performance when we think suboptimally. Leading companies employ Optimal Thinking to optimize thinking, productivity, morale and profitability.
Rating:
Summary: THE best
Review: There's really no comparison. Buy "Beans" as well. That's all.
Rating: 
Summary: Discipline and Patience
Review: In this book, Jim Collins makes a case for working with discipline and patience to achieve something that you are passionate about. He points out that becoming great takes time and you have to work on it with a clear sense of your destiny, with the right people, and with conviction. I like the fact that Jim uses examples of companies that have not been extensively written about in other business books. In other words, the stories used in the book are fresh, not recyled. The ideas are very appealing but as Jim admits himself, very difficult to implement in practice. Don't expect to apply these ideas and see a turnaround anytime soon! But at little over two hunderd pages, this book is well worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Landmark book for all in business
Review: The focus of this book is to identify the factors and behaviors that have a very high correlation to outstanding business success measured by sustained, long term stock returns much higher than comparable companies. Great CEOs and managers understand how to do this, but to a significant extent, their methods are learned by trial and error, and the quality of such a leader depends on the number of these they have experienced. In this book, Collins lucidly describes surprisingly simple, sometimes counterintuitive findings that are explicitly correlated with corporate success. The clear descriptions of methodology Collins undertook and the thoroughness and avoidance of prebias they showed are exemplary on their own. Facts would be discussed among the research group until a clear consensus emerged about the theory; then the theory back-tested and accepted only if it had a very high correlation with companies that succeeded and a low (or negative) correlation with the comparable companies that did not. The depth of analysis is outstanding; the lack of bias and the aversion to mold the facts to fit the theory or let the high filtering standards lapse are notable in their own right. In other words, the conclusions are believable because they are based on an outstanding level of analysis and thorough, impartial, critical filtering. And what conclusions they are! Is the great CEO the great showman, the charismatic leader who pumps up the troops? No -- he defines a new "Level 5" leader type who doesn't make a lot of noise externally, but keeps an intense and clearly defined focus on results. Often the great CEO of a great company was someone who didn't have the traditional qualifications for the job and who is to this day anonymous. What about setting corporate strategy? Collins shows that it is not a useful goal on its own -- get a great team of people together and they'll figure out what the right thing to do is. Pay them a lot? No correlation to success. And on and on. I love it. Common sense maybe, but a kind that's been lost in the face of company PR events and insane compensation. This book should help anyone who manages or hires or invests to sort through the complex issues of finding good people and companies who will be successful. Boards of Directors, hiring managers, interviewees and interviewers, investors will all benefit greatly from this book. Non-profit organizations will find virtually all the findings in this book just as useful as for-profits. After reading this book, my approaches to the next steps in my career and to my own investing strategies changed overnight.
Rating:
Summary: Management Ethics 101: Aristotle would be proud!
Review: What? Ethics and business? Yes! What Jim Collins has done fits squarely in the Aristotelian model of ethical discourse. Despite his misgivings about Philip Morris and the issue of smoking (he's a health nut), the great companies he describes are models of flourishing human communities with clear standards of behavior and honesty. One could even say that the people in great companies love their companies and their coworkers in those companies. His methodology reminds us of the loss we suffered when Aristotle's collection of constitutions went missing. For serious readers, a comparison with Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue and Whose Justice, Which Rationality would be most rewarding. Both authors are on to something regarding traditions, practices, critical thinking, and the goods to be achieved in flourishing communities. There are lessons in this book for those who believe that good management and good ethics are somehow different. The moral value of Level Five leaders begs for wider consideration. Marrying ethics to success in business would really be revolutionary!
Rating:
Summary: Good to Great
Review: Should it come as a surprise that a thorough research project, which set out to find the combination of elements that businesses use to become great, discovered that great leaders maintain humility and will, that great companies seek to put the best people in the right places in their organizations, that the best people are not afraid to face the "brutal facts", that great strategic directions are established through understanding, that great organizational cultures are characterized by discipline and commitment, and that great companies employ technology intelligently not hastily? I would think not, yet somehow, Jim Collins' work (and the work of his sizable team of researchers) reads like a series of remarkable revelations, which provide insight on the processes of organizational greatness. What is perhaps most amazing about this work (and it is amazing in many ways) is how Collins and his team created such a simple and readable book about an utterly complex subject. Collins and his team set out to find what it takes to a make a great company. They measured greatness by a corporate performance. If a company's stock returns beat the general market by more three times over at least fifteen years after previously being at or below the market for at least fifteen years, it landed itself in the good to great category. Eleven companies made it onto the good to great list from the 1, 435 publicly traded companies that were initially evaluated. Once the eleven companies were identified, Collins' research team explored them and their comparison companies, which could have made the jump to greatness but didn't, to discover what they did that other companies didn't. The book is a detailed explanation of the six elements of greatness and how they contribute to a calculus of change, growth and improvement. This book will not disappoint anyone interested in organizational culture, leadership or change. It is loaded with personal and organizational stories from the good to great companies. Nor will it trouble anyone interested in research as Collins and his team include detailed explanations and analyses of their methodologies throughout the book and in an epilogue and appendix section of more than fifty pages. The good great leaders were all "level 5" executives. They combined personal humility with resolve. Comparison company leaders, while skilled and sometimes brilliant, lacked one or both of these leadership qualities. In ten of the eleven good to great companies, the level 5 leaders were hired from within the company. Not only did they bring knowledge to their work, but a fundamental passion for and love of the company and its goals. Good to great companies focused first on people and second on task. These companies sought to bring the best people to their quest. Often bringing in the right people meant not hiring the person with the most knowledge, but instead with the right combination of character traits. ("Good to great management teams consist of people who debate vigorously in search of the best answers, yet who unify behind decisions, regardless of parochial interests." p. 63) The good to great leaders displayed unfailing courage in collecting and understanding data. Not driven by ego or idealism, the good to great leaders faced the facts and directed their companies accordingly. (In these companies a culture in which "people have a tremendous opportunity to be heard, and ultimately for the truth to be heard" (p. 88) was apparent.) The good to great companies all embraced "the hedgehog concept": an understanding about what they were deeply passionate; clarity about how to measure their bottom line; and a shared vision for what they could do better than anyone else. On average, it took four years for these companies to get to the hedgehog concept. Great people put the long term interests of the company ahead of their own short term goals. They exhibit "disciplined action" and are fanatical about adhering to the hedgehog concept. "A culture of discipline is not just about action. It is about getting disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and who then take disciplined action." (p.142) The people in the good to great companies respond to social and technological changes "with thoughtfulness and creativity" instead of being "motivated by fear of being left behind." (p.163) (Of the eighty-four interviews conducted with leaders in the good to great companies, 80% didn't mention technology at all as one of the top five factors in their transition to greatness.) Interestingly, the good to great companies spent little if any time working on culture, commitment, or alignment. Great people participating in a dynamic calculus of change take care those problems naturally. "Alignment principally follows from results and momentum, not the other way around." (p.187) This book will always have a special place on book shelf. While it is fascinating and instructive on many levels, it has provided nourishment for my soul. What it tells us is that great organizations and people are fundamentally good.
Rating:
Summary: Our MBA review
Review: For our MBA class we (The five members of the "Good to Great" team) did a study of this book. Darryl came up with this review! "This was a great book and an easy read. It incorporates many simple ideas and puts them onto paper in terms of which we will remember. Too many books that that I have read leave me with the feeling of what did I just read. Because the fact that all the information in this book is backed up by research, this book has true meaning behind its message. I highly recommend this book to managers or CEO's that are not quite sure which direction to take their business to reach the "next level."" The group all enjoyed the book and we also thought this book would be excellent for those wanting to transform their organization whether it is a company, school or church. We especially enjoyed how the themes such as the Hedge Hog Concept, Level Five Leaders, and the Flywheel Concept were so vividly portrayed and easy to correlate with real life business. From the "Good to Great" team
| 
