Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

Rating:
Summary: How to Make the Jump
Review: There aren't many authors who have written two great business books. Jim Collins can make that claim.

The first one, co-authored with Jerry Porras was Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. In that book, the authors took a look at companies who'd had long-term success , drew some conclusions about what they had in common and compared them with other companies who were good, but not great.

That was good. It just wasn't enough. Built to Last didn't tell us how companies moved from mediocrity to greatness. That's what Collins chose to study and to write about in his second book, Good to Great.

In both books, Collins' research follows a strict regimen, using the public record, to identify companies that meet specific criteria. For this book, those criteria help Collins identify eleven companies made that switch from mediocrity to greatness.

The ultimate measure of mediocrity and stunning success is stock price. Each company that Collins studied went along for years with ho-hum stock performance. Then, all of a sudden, the curve shot upward. The question Collins asks for us is: "What did they do that made such a dramatic and long term difference in the stock price?"

With the list of companies established, Collins and his research team start looking at the histories of the companies, searching for clues about what the companies did to generate the change in their performance. The major tool here is coverage in the business press.

This gives us two very different kinds of research. The first phase, where companies are identified based on specific criteria that are solid and easy to verify. Stock price is the measure. The price was this and then it shot up to that. You might join me in wishing another measure of success had been used, but there it is.

The second phase is informed interpretation. The research involved reading everything the team could find about the key companies and then talking about what they found. Patterns began to emerge. Those patterns turned into "findings." Most of them make sense to me.

For example, "A Culture of Discipline" and "The Hedgehog Concept" make sense based on his team's analysis but they also makes sense to me based on my experience, working with companies for over thirty years.

A couple of the findings seem to owe as much to the fads of the day as they do to research. The material on technology accelerators, for example, probably wouldn't have been in the book if the book had been written in 1981. Today, though, if you write a book about business, technology is one of the lenses you look through.

Then there is Collins' material on Level Five Leadership. This seems like the part of the book where the consultant comes up with some "system" upon which to base workshops, licensed training and other such profit builders. This material is mostly solid, but nothing radically different from most of writing about good leadership. The one exception is also the part I have a problem with.

Collins identifies "humility" as a characteristic of a Level Five Leader. I don't think his data support that. The people he describes seem no more or less humble than any other group of high achievers. Where they differ from many of today's most celebrated CEOs is that they clearly are more concerned with how their company does, than they are with how they look on the cover of Business Week. I would have been more comfortable if he'd described the CEOs of his eleven companies as "results-focused" or "company-focused" and then compared them to star-type CEOs.

These are small nits to pick on an excellent work. If you're looking for a book that will give you some solid clues about how companies have changed from mediocre performers to stars, this is the book for you.

Rating:
Summary: Perfect combination: thoroughly academic, easily readable
Review: Jim Collins is one of the few business writers that has delivered thoroughly fact-based and academic conclusions as to how companies become not only successful, but also sustainable.

The author's insights into effective leadership qualities are unique--and probably particularly challenging for traditionally arrogant, flashy, loud leaders to transform into. Another unique insight, which I find interesting but struggle with, is the idea of gradual and ongoing "tweaking" that occurred in featured companies instead of relying on comprehensive strategic planning processes. I do not recall having run across similar conclusions in any of the other business books I've read.

The best part of this book is that it is written in a very readable and understable way that people at all levels of business can understand and use.

Rating:
Summary: Much More Than Just Another Business Book
Review: Jim Collins wrote easily one of the most stimulating books I have ever read about organizational leadership and effectiveness. What made this book really stand out from other business-oriented books was how applicable the approach, advice, and conclusions were to all organizations -- large or small, public or private, profit or non-profit -- and to individuals' personal lives. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about what it takes to transform yourself and your organization from mediocrity to greatness.

This book is a detailed and well-documented study about the differences between good and great. Collins and his team of researchers and analysts used a common-sense research methodology and readily available data on public companies for their study. From those dry, humble beginnings, Collins transformed his team's efforts into rich and dynamic principles about life and organizations that can propel both from being just good to being truly great.

According to Collins, "I like to think of our work as a search for timeless principles - the enduring physics of great organizations - that will remain true and relevant no matter how the world changes around us...That good is the enemy of great is not just a business problem. It is a `human' problem. If we have cracked the code on the question of good to great, we should have something of value to any type of organization."

The book's chapters were sequential and based upon what Collins and his team learned about the journey to greatness. Each chapter contained facts, stories, statistics, and credible analysis, and ended with a summary of two distinct parts: key points and unexpected findings. While the key points were critical to reinforcing the chapters' material, I thought the unexpected findings were invaluable in exposing the common myths and misperceptions about greatness that Collins' research disproved.

I can honestly say that the book's content and Collins' easy-to-understand writing style kept me interested and fully engaged from cover to cover - the lines and margins of my book have my highlights, underlines, and extensive notes to prove it! In the last six pages before the epilogue, Collins explained the broader, universal context of his work and showed how and why it can be applied to individuals and all organizations. Those very focused and powerful pages helped solidify in my mind why I consider this book one of the best and most important books I have ever read.