Product Description

The Challenge
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning.

But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

The Study
For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

The Standards
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

The Comparisons
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?

Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't.

The Findings
The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10
• Released on: 2001-10-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 300 pages

Amazon.com Review
Five years ago, Jim Collins asked the question, "Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?" In Good to Great Collins, the author of Built to Last, concludes that it is possible, but finds there are no silver bullets. Collins and his team of researchers began their quest by sorting through a list of 1,435 companies, looking for those that made substantial improvements in their performance over time. They finally settled on 11--including Fannie Mae, Gillette, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo--and discovered common traits that challenged many of the conventional notions of corporate success. Making the transition from good to great doesn't require a high-profile CEO, the latest technology, innovative change management, or even a fine-tuned business strategy. At the heart of those rare and truly great companies was a corporate culture that rigorously found and promoted disciplined people to think and act in a disciplined manner. Peppered with dozens of stories and examples from the great and not so great, the book offers a well-reasoned road map to excellence that any organization would do well to consider. Like Built to Last, Good to Great is one of those books that managers and CEOs will be reading and rereading for years to come. --Harry C. Edwards

From Publishers Weekly
In what Collins terms a prequel to the bestseller Built to Last he wrote with Jerry Porras, this worthwhile effort explores the way good organizations can be turned into ones that produce great, sustained results. To find the keys to greatness, Collins's 21-person research team (at his management research firm) read and coded 6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and created 384 megabytes of computer data in a five-year project. That Collins is able to distill the findings into a cogent, well-argued and instructive guide is a testament to his writing skills. After establishing a definition of a good-to-great transition that involves a 10-year fallow period followed by 15 years of increased profits, Collins's crew combed through every company that has made the Fortune 500 (approximately 1,400) and found 11 that met their criteria, including Walgreens, Kimberly Clark and Circuit City. At the heart of the findings about these companies' stellar successes is what Collins calls the Hedgehog Concept, a product or service that leads a company to outshine all worldwide competitors, that drives a company's economic engine and that a company is passionate about. While the companies that achieved greatness were all in different industries, each engaged in versions of Collins's strategies. While some of the overall findings are counterintuitive (e.g., the most effective leaders are humble and strong-willed rather than outgoing), many of Collins's perspectives on running a business are amazingly simple and commonsense. This is not to suggest, however, that executives at all levels wouldn't benefit from reading this book; after all, only 11 companies managed to figure out how to change their B grade to an A on their own.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Collins is coauthor of Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (1994), the widely heralded book that was the result of a six-year research project conducted by Collins and Jerry Porras. They identified 18 companies that met their rigorous standard for long-term performance. They looked for companies that had outperformed the stock market by a factor of 15 starting from 1926. Then they went about the task of identifying what these companies had in common. Now Collins turns his attention to companies that have made the transition from "good to great." This time the findings are backed by five years of research and data analysis. Starting with every company that ever appeared in the Fortune 500, Collins identifies 11 companies that had 15-year cumulative stock returns at or below the general stock market when, after a transition point, they then demonstrated cumulative returns of at least three times the market over the next 15 years. Collins then looked for similarities among the companies. What he found would both surprise and fascinate anyone involved in management. David Rouse
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Good to Great + consistent Optimal Thinking = Best
This book is a fascinating read! A study taken over five years began with twenty-eight corporations and revealed eleven that had made the leap from Good to Great. From this study, I gained an instant understanding of the role of humility in leadership. The primary ambition of great leaders is focused on the success of their company, not on themselves.

Collins advocates the Hedgehog Concept - a combination of discovering what you can be best in the world at (Optimal Thinking), what you are passionate about, and what drives your economic engine. Collins states that sustained disciplined action is primarily achieved by "fanatical adherence to the Hedgehog Concept and the willingness to shun opportunities that fall outside the three circles." So my question is: How do you identify the best? I recommend Optimal Thinking: How To Be Your Best Self by Dr. Rosalene Glickman as an adjunct to this powerful book to provide the mental resource to identify the best, optimize emotional and financial intelligence and create a corporate culture of optimization. From Good to Greatest to Best!"

Unwavering resolve to do what must be done
Unwavering resolve to do what must be done! Ah -- a characteristic of the Level 5 (Good to Great) leader, described in this well researched book that shows the reader what it takes to take a good company to greatness. Personal humility fortified with professional will gives Good to Great leaders the edge on their ego-driven counterparts. Collins makes many marvellous points, the first being that the RIGHT people are your most important asset. By rising above unrealistic optimism, confronting brutal facts and asking questions that lead to the greatest insights (optimal thinking), the leader moves his company to greatness. Good to Great leaders focus on the few things that have the greatest impact (optimal thinking). Collins won me when he said "One of the primary ways to de-motivate people is to ignore the brutal facts of reality." Good to Great leaders create a culture where the truth is heard, and where negative thinking is not degraded or scorned (optimal thinking). This book is a must read!

Well written and entertaining too
Good to Great is a comphrehensive research project, well written
and entertaining to read, Good to Great is a worthy successor to, and in the tradition of, Built to Last.