Rating: 
Summary: Will you be mediocre or excellent?
Review: Jim Collins investigates several companies that have gone from being mediocre to excellent. He finds that they have been able to create a set of characteristics, including the following, which enabled them to go from good to great.Level 5 Leadership - Level 5 Leaders are driven, humble, modest and more concerned about the prosperity of the company than their individual success. They resolve to do whatever it takes to make the company great, no matter how hard the decisions are.
First Who...Then What - Using a bus analogy, Collins claims that great companies first get great people on the bus, then decide where to drive it. According to Collins, the right people
are your most important asset.
Confront the Brutal Facts - but don't lose faith. These companies believe that they will prevail in the end, but also have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of their current situation.
The Hedgehog Concept - Good-to-Great companies do what they can do best (not what they want to do best), what they are deeply passionate about, and they focus on what drives their economic engine.
A Culture of Discipline -Discipline means that there is little or no need for hierarchy, bureaucracy, or excessive control.
Technology -Technology has little to do with the transformation from good to great. It may help accelerate it but is not the cause of it. For a detailed summary visit my site via my 'more about me' section. All in all, this is an excellent book that helps you see what you are doing right or wrong in your organization.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Just Read the Summary
Review: I suspect most people who pick up the book will do what I did-- look for the bottom line, the summary of findings. Reading the summary is not enough. When I read the summary, I thought the advice was too general and I was disappointed because I wanted specific information-- I wanted to know each step I needed to take to reach success. Fortunately, I read beyond the summary, read each chapter in full, which you must do in order to absorb the excellant business logic found in this book. The book teaches you how to drive the bus toward a successful business. I learned that just as in driving a car, when you drive a business, you must find the right focal point-- a point not just in front of your front wheel, but far enough ahead that you clearly see the best route to get where you want to go. The ideas in the book are inspiring and apply to all businesses. My only disappointment was that I did not find a million dollar cashier's check stuck between the pages.
Rating: 
Summary: Beautifully researched
Review: I vacillated over rating this book between a 4 and 5 star rating. This book is very well conceived, researched, and ascribed throughout the book to Jim Collin's adept research team in Boulder. I would love to be a 'fly on the wall' to eavesdrop on the dialogue of the pertinent chapter deliverables. I'm sure it was rewarding debates. The reason, I allocated a 4-star instead of a 5-star rating was the editing foibles. Although, this book was cogent to read, I think the editors missed some rudimentary diction and syntax errors. It reads shoddy when a poignant author is left with choppy sentences. I understand that this is trivial, but nonetheless, imperative for 'Great' nonfiction reporting. I recommend this book. In addition, I suggest that you read the entire book including the FAQ's and criteria selection for Good to great and Comparison companies. Halfway through the book, I was apprehensive that "Good to Great" was an arbitrary collage of companies that fared better than the general stock market and its competitor's. These thoughts were dispelled and confirmed the authenticity of Collins's work through his team's statistical analysis. However, the research is a tad prejudice, because of the criterion selection. Namely, American companies selected from the Forbes 500 list. It leaves me with a lingering question.....What entrenched characteristics do our European counterparts agree or disagree with in their search to propel its organizations from a 'Good Company' to a "Great Company?" "Good to Great," is a very good compilation of successful companies that have made the leap from Good to Great. Jim Collins's, "Built to Last" is equal in talent and a suggested referral.
Rating:
Summary: How to Build a Company
Review: This is a prequel to the author's previous best selling book Built to Last. Collins is a researcher. He reads more books, listens to more tapes and works with more investigative interns than anyone in the business. He studies companies, successful and unsuccessful, and his books are the result. Jim Collins does not make the history-he just records it. And he reports it very well. His findings are not pop culture. This is one of the most important books I have read this year. Dan Poynter, ParaPublishing.com
Rating:
Summary: A Powerful Antidote for the Quarterly Profit Trap
Review: In times of economy downturn and falling quarterly profit, reducing workforce and defaulting inventories seem to be a quick answer to restore corporate health. Unfortunately, they often destroy the weak foundations on which many corporations are built today. The advices and rescue efforts from management gurus often fail to work. This leads one to wonder if there are better solutions. And there are. According to Mr. Collins and his research team, companies who make the leap from good to great can survive and even prosper during tough times. The research findings are so simple that one may find them hard to swallow. But that's precisely the point. One of the most powerful formula in the world is not a complex integral but a simple equation: E=MC2. I think the findings are best represented as a framework for businesses to operate. They enable business owners and managers to analyze both the financial and humanistic aspects of their business. Making money is important but we all know it's not the only reason why we are in business. Passion, customer values, social contribution, etc. are some additional forces. This book helps to link them together and allow the organization to make the transformation from good to great. What is lacking is specific techiques to practice the framework/principles. However, there are plenty of books and management gurus out there who can help. It will be up to the readers to select and use what work for them. This book is not an answer for all but only for those who want to become great!
Rating:
Summary: Good to Great is a Great Book
Review: Every once and a while a business book comes along that revolutionizes our thinking and becomes a classic. Good to great is just such a book. The book starts with the provocative statement "Good is the enemy of great." Collins then develops objective criteria that differentiated the good from the great companies, and noted that there is a point at which the great companies started behaving remarkably differently from their good counterparts. The great companies "attained extraordinary results, averaging cumulative stock returns 6.9 times the general market in the fifteen years following their transition from good to great." Collins then compares these extraordinary companies with other companies, which remained good but did not reach the transition from good to great. Amongst the factors that differentiated the great companies were level 5 leadership, hiring the right people and letting go of the wrong, confronting all of the facts -- especially the brutal ones, developing an incredible focus and a culture of discipline, using technology accelerators, developing momentum that reaches a critical mass. This book is like a superb seven course meal and it will challenge your view of the world as it did mine - and we will all be better off for having read it.
Rating:
Summary: Good read, even for the non-business readers
Review: Great concept for a study and book. There are so many books ut ther on how to make yourself more successful and effective at business and the few I have tried to read just could not keep me turning the page. Collins' book is different. The writing is crisp and clean and his anologies from the business world to personal life resonate and keep the book moving. And because the boot is well footnoted, a lot of the details of the study (and sources) are available at the end of the reading and not scattered throughout the text, bogging it down. The book reads quiker than one thinks and is well organized. I recommend to anyone with the slightest interest in how successful businesses operate.
Rating:
Summary: Useful for the Key Managers in An Organization
Review: This is another book from the new trend of collecting data, and come out with a summary. Instead of having a set of guidance in mind and trying to convince the readers abuot its value, books like this one and the "First, Break All the Rules" did the survey and extract the common factors among the subjects. I know several companies bought many copies of this book and distributed to their middle and high level managers. An easy reading that is quite useful!
Rating: 
Summary: A Great Hook, Not A Great Book
Review: The book is very well researched and reads very smoothly. At 210 pages, "Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make The Leap and Others Don't" reads very quickly. Jim Collins writes in a clear, concise style that uses effective analogies to get his points across. But I gained little from reading this book. The insights are good but not great, they are simply not new. The road to greatness according to Jim Collins is: 1. Get the right people
2. Set the right goals
3. Execute relentlessly The data mining exercise that Jim Collins put his team through yielded few surprising results, and whatever useful lessons can be drawn from the exercise I can summarize in 10 pages. This is a deep quackery, another "Who Moved My Cheese" for people who spend all day in meetings trading consultant speak, thinking they're working and "adding value".
Rating:
Summary: Work For Me
Review: I believe what James Collins says in "Good To Great" is of considerable value to American business. It provides anecdotal information on how businesses can become great. I have also taken the advice of others who have read "Good To Great" and gone on to read "West Point: Character Leadership Education..." by Remick, a very educational corollary to "Good To Great" that teaches the philosophical underpinnings to what James Collins says in "Good To Great". Setting up West Point as a metaphor for America, the Remick book is, like James Collins' "Good To Great", of critical value to American business. Collins teaches the American business community how to be great. But, it must never cease to be "good", a different kind of "good" - having morals, ethics, honesty, and character. For, like America writ large, if it ceases to be "good", it will cease to be great. We are seeing how true that is in corporate and financial America, lately. It could be devastating to our economic system. James Collins' book professionally tells you how to go from good to great. He does a wonderful job. The Remick book tells you how to remain great by also remaining "good", a different kind of good. These books may not be for everyone, but they work for me in the corporate America I know.
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