Books : Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 658
EAN: 9780066620992
ISBN: 0066620996
Label: Collins Business
Manufacturer: Collins Business
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 300
Publication Date: 2001-10
Publisher: Collins Business
Release Date: October 16, 2001
Sales Rank: 84
Studio: Collins Business
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Editorial Review:
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:
Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.
“Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.”
Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?
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
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
Extremely well written. The valuable information from Collin's Good to Great is useful not only in a business but also in one's personal life. A must buy!
Rating:  -
Please google critical review of G2G before reading. There are major problems with the "research" presented. Check out Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Black Swan" for some insight into what really makes a company great. The answer; no one really knows. It's all random.
Business books are nothing but fads and fashion. Read, borrow a couple of ideas, then throw them in the trash when you are done. G2G became required reading where I work and in my view has nearly destroyed the company. It ... Read More
Rating:  -
I picked up this book from the bed and breakfast bookshelf while on vacation. It's not a book I normally would have chosen to read on vacation, but it was well written and was surprisingly engaging for the topic. It's a study of companies that were good companies for awhile (at least 15 years), then became great companies (outperforming the stock market by at least 3x over at least 15 years). What they found in the eleven companies that met the criteria were some interesting and at times counterintuitive ... Read More
Rating: -
Very good research and well written. Somewhat dated since 3 of these companies are in trouble today, but the others are still among the best.
Rating: -
Jim Collins' study of business core values, principles and success concepts was expected to be timeless, even if the companies in the book were not. This is never more true than in the later half of 2008 where we see time after time companies missing the mark on these concepts and faltering badly.
I suggest that Congress, the auto makers, unions and especially Wall Street read carefully, no study the concepts in Good to Great. Had Fannie Mae continued the principles it displayed in this study, ... Read More
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