Rating: 
Summary: Engaging & Clear
Review: This was my first foray into the world of Jim Collins and his insightful look at trends in the marketplace. It was a great first read! Collins lets the data speak for itself and finds that leadership matters, and innovation is essential. I grew up thinking CEO's needed to be bombastic and celebrities in order to be successful. Little did I know that the most successful CEO's were keeping a low profile and returning the most money to their stockholders. In an era of corporate failure - this book points out what did work in the last twenty years. The data and conclusions that Collins draws about Level 5 leaders is excellent. This is a very solid work and is entertaining as well. Joseph Dworak
Rating: 
Summary: clear, realistic, and inspiring
Review: This is a great biz book: it is eminently practical, beautifully written, and in my own investigations I have seen exactly what the author is talking about. Stories are also interwoven in the book is a useful and interesting, indeed fascinating, way and greatly add to the text rather act as filler. Indeed, this is one of the few biz books I know that is worth reading all the way through, whereas most can be digested solely from reading the cover blurbs or at most the first chapter. Simply put, Collins et al advocate putting the right people in the right place ("on the bus"), then carefully developing a simple and utterly clear vision of where to go ("hedgehog concept"), and finally to make incremental steps that add up into major breakthroughs ("moving the flywheel"). Time and again, I have seen this pattern in the great companies that I have been in, from China and Italy to the US: you get a great leader who is tough yet fair and self-effacing, who develops a common vision through trial and error, and then people join in of their own accord and work extremely hard to realize their common vision. This book offers a framework to analyse these ideas systematically and I will use it for years to come. Highly recommended. However common-sensical this all may sound, everyone can learn from this, particularly in the detailed stories, but also in the lists of ideas.
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Summary: a very compelling management book
Review: Good to Great provides valuable insights into what has made certain companies great. I appreciated the scientific approach taken by Jim Collins and his team. They obviously spent an enormous amount of time gathering data to support their conclusions. This book has given me a lot to think about in terms of how I run my business,
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Summary: The title says it all . . . Great!
Review: This is one of the best business books I have read in the past couple years. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in business. Jim Collins shares a great deal of well-thought-out research in a readable, easy-to-understand way. I was particularly fascinated by his concept of Level Five Leadership, which seems to run counter to the idea that the best CEO is brash, arrogant, famous and egotistical - all traits our society seems to favor in top managers today (hello Enron, Tyco, et al.). There were several other concepts I particularly liked -- his ideas of the "fly wheel," "the stop doing list" and "finding what drives your economic engine," which I have spent some time actually doing in my own small business. One downside to the book - I found at times that Collins' values and ideas about effective leadership color his interpretation of the data presented, even though he explicitly states in the first few pages that pains were taken to present only objective evidence. However, this never prevented me from truly enjoying the book. In fact, I liked this book so much that I recommended it to a number of friends and colleagues . . . they loved it too.
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Summary: Against the Grain...
Review: For years, in fact perhaps decades, men with their Gillette razors have been shaving towards the grain, and in the same up-down motion. But with the advent of the Mach3, we can now shave against the grain, for a smoother, cleaner shave. Equally important, with this book, men and women everywhere can quickly dispel the ever present myths which advocate a management view of "the next big thing" , technological innovation, or radical corporate fads. Good to Great, isn't about any of those things. It's a plain look at what makes companies transform from mediocre to greatness. Collins and his team argue that good is the enemy of great and the path to great is one which involves no gimmicks, fads or radical changes. Their findings are those of common sense. Great management, great processes, and great products create great companies. Unlike the follow the grain tendencies of the last 20 years, Collins and his team argue that one must shave against the grain and against the buildup of mediocrity to achieve greatness. They profile over a dozen companies that made this jump and they tell each and every one of us how to manage or create a similar jump. Collins and his team are at their best when they take abstract ideas and show how companies like Nucor, Walgreens and Gillette apply those ideas to achieve greatness. A good read to contrast against the ideas of Collins is The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell. Good to Great is an essential read for anyone who is looking for a dummie's approach to duty and destiny.
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Summary: How To Win Success And Influence People
Review: Anyone who is ambitious and striving for success should read Jim Collins' "Good to Great". It imparts wonderful anecdotal and empirical information that will help you reach your highest aspirations. As a consultant, I now recommend to people from all over the world to first read "Good to Great" for the practical side of the leadership story. Then, if I may say so, go on to read Norman Thomas Remick's "West Point: Thomas Jefferson: Character Leadership Education" for a simple but important understanding of the philosophical basics that underpin all of leadership. It has terrific synergy with Jim Collins' great book, "Good to Great". If you want to win success and influence people, that is my advice, freely given.
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Summary: Good to Great +Super Self=Super Success!
Review: Good to great is an outstanding book that show how top business people achieving incredible growth and passed their peers. Two other good books are Double Digit Growth and Super Self by Charles Givens. All three books are favorites at the 3,000 employee company that I work for. Particularly among managers and those who want to be.
Rating: 
Summary: Historical data does not compute always for current companie
Review: The number 1 fallacy is if a dog is brown, a cat is brown, therefore a cat is a dog. Similar to the same train of thought, Good to Great presents the same formula-based approach of dissecting historical data of successful companies, without understanding just how companies not only operate at the macro level, much of their successes or failures can result at the micro level too. Rather superficial and flawed arguments. Try more balanced approaches without hyperbole, like The Art of Happiness at Work or the new book Dot Zen.
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Summary: Why GtG is a brain-dead book
Review: Imagine 1,024 people participating in a coin-flipping exercise. Those who flip heads "win," those who flip tails are eliminated. Now let's assume that the coin-flipping adheres to the norm--that is, a flip yields heads half the time, and tails half the time. And let's do the flip-and-elimination exercise 10 times. At the end, out of 1024 competitors, you should have one winner who's flipped 10 consecutive heads. Is the winner great at flipping heads? No. Is the winner lucky? No. Is the winner inevitable? YES. And that's the problem with Jim Collins' dunderheaded exercise--he's wowed by the winning coin flipper's success. He can't wait to interview the flipping champion, pore over the data to recreate the sheer drama/moments of truth surrounding each individual flip, find the subtle nuances beneath the flipper's consistent performance, and draw universally applicable lessons from the coin flipper's astounding success. I mean, how can anyone argue with TEN CONSECUTIVE flips of heads, right? Um, actually everyone should argue with it, Jimmy. Just like Tom Peters did fifteen years before with In Search of Excellence, Collins sanctifies his business winners, completely overlooking the fact that 1) plenty of business losers followed IDENTICAL strategies and still lost and 2) if you have any criteria for excellence that generates more than zero companies pulled from a universe of more than zero companies, then one or more companies MUST, by definition, make the cut, which leads us to 3) so what?--without a statistically rigorous analysis, there's a fairly serious possibility that a number of companies are making the cut RANDOMLY. Collins really stumbles on this last one--without statistical proof, not only can't he distinguish between Good and Great, he can't even make the call between Good and Kind of Random, Dude. Like Collins' masquerade, Peters' book was a big hit, but followers of Peters soon ran into the Law of George Bernard Shaw--Time Wounds All Heels; most of the companies Peters championed in his book quickly floundered. Some of Collins' sainted companies are already floundering as well... Books like Good to Great prey on the fact that you napped through statistics--if you'd been caffeined up during those dull lectures, you'd have remembered the fallacy of composition (the coin flipper's exercise), the distinction between random outcomes and relevant ones, and the enormous difference between what's causal and what's coincidental. Look, there's nothing new in business: there are only a few basic strategies, and only a few macro and microeconomic truths. Ever notice how fads like supply side economics, the Japanization of America, the endless bull market, the end of history, The New Economy and the Macarena all seemed to collapse under the weight of basic market concepts you already knew? So SNAP OUT OF IT, gulp down that double espresso, go back to your old and boring (but still accurate and useful) Michael Porter, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Benjamim Graham, and Burton Malkiel, and stop chasing misallocated or downright blockheaded metaphors from Who Moved My Cheese, The Art of War and poor, misunderstood Charles Darwin, and for God's sake, please take a pass on this Three Card Monte of a book.
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Summary: Good to Great Lives up to its title
Review: Good to Great by Jim Collins
Book Review by Richard Reisman Jim Collins book Good to Great, describes a 5 year intensive research effort by a group of 20 people led by Collins who investigated the defining criteria of eleven companies which demonstrated "good to great" growth. This growth was defined as "fifteen year cumulative stock returns at or below the general stock market, punctuated by a transition point, then cumulative returns at least three times the market over the next fifteen years". The eleven companies found to meet this criteria were Abbott, Circuit City, Fannie Mae, Gillette, Kimberly-Clark, Kroger, Nucor, Philip Morris, Pitney Bowes, Walgreen's, and Wells Fargo. Once the eleven companies were picked, a control group of "comparison companies" was used to help differentiate the characteristics which were responsible for the phenomenal success of the good to great companies and were missing in the "comparison companies". The comparison companies were either in the same industry as the good to great companies with similar opportunity or were companies which had a brief growth spurt which was not sustained.
Exhaustive research by Collins' team which is nicely summarized in the Appendices elucidated six basic characteristics of the eleven great companies with each of the six elaborately described in individual chapters. The book turned out to be a page turner because of the captivating and inspiring stories told about the people in the companies and the paths that were taken to gain the highest levels of corporate success. As interesting as the stories were, the surprising and unexpected characteristics which were found in, and defined all eleven companies, added to the enjoyment of reading this book.
The first defining characteristic is "Level 5 Leadership". All of the great companies had leaders who were unexpectedly humble yet had a tenacious professional will whose primary concern was the health and growth of the company. This was compared to the control companies which often had charismatic leaders who make a big splash, looked after their own self interests first and in the end were unable to create sustained growth. The description of Ken Iverson, the dedicated and highly successful Nucor CEO, who still lived in a simple house with a carport and scraped ice off his car windows with a credit card sets the tone of the book which throughout emphasizes the "salt of the earth" nature of the companies leaders. The description of the control companies CEO's who had a need for self aggrandizement were reminiscent of the Tyco, Enron, Time Warner and WorldCom's CEO's.
The second defining characteristic is entitled "first who... then what". This is another unexpected finding. The great companies did not formulate a great strategy first as did the control companies. Instead, the CEO's initially spent their energies hiring the best people for the job ahead and firing employees who they did not believe demonstrated the necessary personality traits and work ethic. By and large these employee characteristics consisted of creative people who were self motivated and did not need to be micro managed. This chapter also described three "pearls" which I believe will be very helpful in my own working life. They are: 1) When in doubt, don't hire- keep looking 2) When you know you need to make a people change, act and 3) Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems. The third defining characteristic is called "Confront the Brutal facts". A Socratic style evident in all of the great companies is discussed, in which their status during the transition period is very honestly evaluated. This honest appraisal leads to the fourth characteristic named the Hedgehog concept. Simply put, the great companies used three questions to form a simple and direct growth strategy. These questions are: 1) What can we be the best in the world at? 2) What drives our economic engine? And 3) What are we deeply passionate about? I felt that all three of these questions will be worthwhile asking in my own workplace.
Finally, the last two criteria discussed are entitled "A Culture of Discipline" and "Technology Accelerators". These chapters discuss the type of employees in the good to great companies. They reminded me of the type of employees that the One Minute Manager by Blanchard and Johnson described working for their quintessential manager. Most importantly, they were people who with proper guidance did not need to be micromanaged. Furthermore, they were dedicated to and believed the goals of the company. Technology accelerators communicates the concept that the great companies did not become great secondary to the technology they used but rather that companies that are great successfully decide on which technology will best complement the goals dictated by the hedgehog concepts.
Good to Great ends by identifying the concept that the great companies exemplified the old age "slow and steady wins the race". They did not try and create an overnight turnaround which in the end would have no sustainability but instead religiously followed the necessary path step by step, to make sure their company had a solid foundation with the appropriate employees, goals, attitudes and technology in place.
Good to Great can be criticized for setting such a high standard for the companies they chose. The argument can be made that companies can be great without having astonishing financial growth. With that said, the book describes many management and employee principles that can be well used by any company interested in improving its business.
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