Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how longterm sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning.

But what about companies that are not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? Are there those that convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? If so, what are the distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

Over five years, Jim Collins and his research team have analyzed the histories of 28 companies, discovering why some companies make the leap and others don't. The findings include:

• Level 5 Leadership: A surprising style, required for greatness.
• The Hedgehog Concept: Finding your three circles, to transcend the curse of competence.
• A Culture of Discipline: The alchemy of great results.
• Technology Accelerators: How good-to-great companies think differently about technology.
• The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Why those who do radical restructuring fail to make the leap.

Jim Collins and his team have done an enormous amount of interesting work to determine whether a good company can be come a great company, and how. The answer to the former question is "yes," assuming that the 11 of 1435 Fortune 500 companies did not make it there by accident. The answer to the latter is less clear. The study group identified a number of characteristics that their 11 companies had in common, which were much less frequently present in comparison companies. However, the study inexplicably fails to look at these same characteristics to see how often they succeed in the general population of companies. If these characteristics work 100 percent of the time, you really have something. If they work 5 percent of the time, then not too much is proven.

How were the 11 study companies selected? The criteria take pages to explain in an appendix. Let me simplify by saying that their stock price growth had to be in a range from somewhat lower than to not much higher than the market averages for 15 years. Then, in the next 15 years the stocks had to soar versus the market averages and comparison companies while remaining independent. That's hard to do. The selected companies are Abbott Laboratories, Circuit City, Fannie Mae, Gillette, Kimberly-Clark, Kroger, Nucor, Philip Morris, Pitney Bowes, Walgreen, and Wells Fargo.

As to the "how," attention was focused on what happened before and during the transition from average performance to high performance. Interviews, quantitative analyses, and business press reports were studied. Clearly, there's a tendency to see things a little bit with 20-20 hindsight in such a situation. Since this study started in 1996, it was dealing with facts that were already quite old while they were being examined. Bias is likely.

The key conclusions as to "how" included the following:

(1) a series of CEOs (promoted from within) who combined "personal humility and professional will" focused on making a great company;

(2) an initial focus on eliminating weak people, adding top performing ones, and establishing a culture of top talent putting out extraordinary effort;

(3) then shifting attention to staring at and thinking unceasingly about the hardest facts about the company's situation;

(4) using facts to develop a simple concept that is iteratively reconsidered to focus action on improving performance;

(5) establishing and maintaining a corporate culture of discipline built around commitments, with freedom about how to meet those promises;

(6) using technology to accelerate progress when it fits the company's concept of what it wants to become; and

(7) the company builds momentum from consistent efforts behind its concept that are reinforced by success.

Then, a connection is made to how these 7 conditions can provide the foundation for establishing a Built to Last type of company that can outperform the competition over many decades.

One potential criticism of the study is that its conclusions could be dated. Former Stanford professor Collins argues that he has uncovered basic facts about human organizations that will be unchanging.

I compared the conclusions in this book with my own studies of top performing CEOs and companies in the 1988-2001 time period. I noticed two major differences that suggest a shift in "best practice" standards. First, those who outperform now have developed processes that create major improvements in their operating business models every 2-5 years. Second, senior management development is focused around improving a culture for defining and implementing such improvements. I suspect that item (4) above was an embryonic predecessor to these new dimensions, which occur much more frequently now than in this study.

Next, I compared the list of 7 items to what I had observed in companies. The biggest point that hit me is how few CEOs have been interested in creating long-term outperformance that lasts past their own tenure in an industry. You also have to be a CEO for a long time with that focus before you have a chance to make a lasting impact. Founders have a special advantage here. Perpetuating outperformance may help fill a psychological need for immortality that fits with founders especially well.

Finally, I thought about what I knew about the companies studied from personal contacts during the study years. My sense is that their stories are far more complex than is captured here. So, I think the data have probably been "scrunched" to fit together in some cases. In particular, I wonder whether these companies will greatly outperform in the next 15 years. In many cases, they expanded to meet an unfilled need that is now largely fulfilled. Can they develop a new concept for (4) that will carry them forward as successfully in the future? My guess is that most will not. If that turns out to be the case, we must conclude that the items on this list may be necessary . . . but may not be sufficient to go permanently from good to great. Time will tell.

Before closing, let me observe that if the research team had also looked at the rate by which their principles succeeded among companies that employed them, this would have been one of the very finest research studies on best practices that I have seen. A book like this will provoke much discussion and thought for years to come. Perhaps that information can be included in a future edition or printing. Then, we will have something magnificent to consider!

Do you want to be the best permanently? Why? Or, why not? Mr. Collins points out that it probably takes no more effort, but a lot more discipline and focus.

Good to Great.....   May 29, 2003
 253 out of 301 found this review helpful

Why do some companies have continuing, sustained growth in excess of those companies around them? What is it that makes them different? Is it charismatic leadership? Right place, right time? Unique product?

This is the question that Jim Collins attempts to answer in Good to Great.

He and a team of 20 researchers spent five years and more than 15,000 manhours researching the question, Why Some Companies Make the Leap, Good to Great...and Others Don't.

They reviewed thousands of books, articles, and annual reports; conducted financial analyses on records that totaled 980 years of combined business records. They interviewed 84 senior executives and board members, scrutinized the personal and professional records of 56 of the CEO's, and researched the executive compensation plans.

They analyzed the patterns in layoffs, how media exposure affected the financial results, and finally, how technology was used and it's effect, if any on the financial performance of the companies. The team researched every aspect that could be quantified, codified, analyzed or compared.

The study begins with 1,435 Fortune 500 companies and narrows the list down to 11 that made the transition from good-to-great companies.

These are companies that stand out as being different from their direct competition.This book shows you objectively what it was that made these companies financial returns 3,4, to 18 times better than stock market averages for 15 years. And, it tells you
how to apply these findings to your business.

Level 5 Leadership: Moving from good to great starts with leadership, with the will and drive to succeed. Not on a personal level, but for the company to succeed.

First Who...Then What: Next find the right people to manage and run the business.

Control the Brutal Facts: Then look at the facts objectively. What are your core competencies?

Hedgehog Concept: Then take action based on being the best at what you can be the best at.

Culture of Discipline: Implement the resulting plan rigorously, with discipline and focus.

Good to Great is a textbook on how to run a successful organization. It includes extensive appendices detailing the methodologies of the research and comphrehensive notes and references.

Good to Great is a must-read for anyone building or leading a business or group. And it challenges a lot of the current hype
about makes a company successful. Whether it be the charismatic CEO, to the hype of IT, or merger mania, none of these contributed to the success of the top 11 companies covered in Good-to-Great.

At 300 pages, Good-to-Great is a comphrehensive research project, well written and entertaining too. If you enjoyed Built to Last, you will love Good-to-Great.


Why GtG is a brain-dead book   March 14, 2004
 229 out of 324 found this review helpful

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.


Well written and entertaining too   February 14, 2003
 153 out of 189 found this review helpful

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.


WELL WRITTEN, BUT SOME CAVEATS   October 19, 2003
 121 out of 239 found this review helpful

The unordained intent of business books is to make you think about certain tenets of performance, with case studies, and Good To Great definitely lives up to that credo. I could even say it is well-written.

But it may be instructive to note that the book represents ONE perspective about SOME arbitrarily chosen companies based on ONE metric, 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 are preparing yourself for a mild disappointment.

Here are the insights you'll be exposed to, so make up your mind about how earth-shattering the offerings of this book are:

[1] Best leaders are not high profile folk but subdued, humble yet focused people who get results. (Not sure. Lee Iacocca, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Jack Welch, Larry Flynt, Rupert Murdoch etc come to mind)

[2] Great leaders are supposed to believe in teamwork (Shlurp! Teamwork! Must make for a deliciously innovative reading)

[3] Companies need to focus on their "key profitability ratio" and hone it down to succeed. (Just me, or this swan-song of "focus" is painfully cliche? Also makes one wonder if business context is stagnant. What happens with KFC, Cadillac, Zenith who have tasted what it feels to run out of steam with a once beaming audience..would honing down their KPRs help? No mechanism to track these KPRs is forthcoming, that is your homework)

All in all, a tough call. I'd still recommend the book for some thoughtful inflight reading, if only for the WAY the authors make their case, but don't expect anything spectacular to ground your business/career on.