Good to Great

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

Front cover
Author Jim C. Collins
Country United States
Language English
Subject Corporate strategy
Genre Non-fiction
Publisher William Collins
Publication date
October 16, 2001
Media type Hardcover
Pages 320
ISBN 978-0-06-662099-2
OCLC 46835556
658 21
LC Class HD57.7 .C645 2001

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't is a management book by Jim C. Collins that aims to describe how companies transition from being average companies to great companies and how companies can fail to make the transition. The book was published on October 16, 2001 by William Collins. "Greatness" is defined as financial performance several multiples better than the market average over a sustained period. Collins finds the main factor for achieving the transition to be a narrow focusing of the company’s resources on their field of competence.

The book was a bestseller, selling four million copies and going far beyond the traditional audience of business books.[1]

Writing

Collins used a large team of researchers who studied "6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and created 384 megabytes of computer data in a five-year project".[2]

Seven characteristics of companies that went from "good to great"

Great companies

Collins finds eleven examples of "great companies" and comparators, similar in industry-type and opportunity, but which failed to achieve the good-to-great growth shown in the great companies:

Great Company Comparator
Abbott Laboratories Upjohn
Circuit City Stores Silo
Fannie Mae Great Western Bank
Gillette Company (now a Procter & Gamble brand) Warner-Lambert Co
Kimberly-Clark Scott Paper Company
Kroger A&P (declared bankruptcy in 2010)
Nucor Bethlehem Steel
Philip Morris R. J. Reynolds
Pitney Bowes Addressograph
Walgreens Eckerd
Wells Fargo Bank of America

Response

The book was "cited by several members of The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council as the best management book they've read."[3]

Publishers Weekly called it "worthwhile", although "many of Collins's perspectives on running a business are amazingly simple and commonsense".[2] Similarly Holt and Cameron state the book provides a "generic business recipe" that ignores "particular strategic opportunities and challenges."[4]

Steven D. Levitt notes that some of the companies selected as "great" have since got into serious trouble, such as Circuit City, while only Nucor had "dramatically outperformed the stock market" and "Abbott Labs and Wells Fargo have done okay". He further states that investing in the portfolio of the 11 companies covered by the book, in the year of 2001, would actually result in underperforming the S&P 500[5] Levitt concludes that books like this are "mostly backward-looking" and can't offer a guide for the future."[6]

Collins reaffirmed that "The books never promised that these companies would always be great, just that they were once great."[7]

See also

References

  1. Bryant, Adam (May 23, 2009). "For This Guru, No Question Is Too Big". New York Times.
  2. 1 2 "GOOD TO GREAT: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... And Others Don't (Review)". September 3, 2001. Retrieved 2012-07-13.
  3. Alan Murray (2010). The Wall Street Journal Essential Guide to Management. New York: HarperCollins. p. 11. ISBN 978-0-06-184033-3.
  4. Holt, Douglas; Cameron, Douglas (2010). Cultural Strategy. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-958740-7.
  5. http://blog.asmartbear.com/business-advice-plagued-by-survivor-bias.html
  6. Levitt, Steven D. (2008-07-28). "From Good to Great … to Below Average". Freakonomics.
  7. Clint Greenleaf (September 14, 2009). "Paranoia: Your Best Friend". Inc. (magazine). Retrieved 2015-07-17.

External links

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