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Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't | 
| Author: Jim Collins
Publisher: Collins Business
Category: Book
List Price: $29.99
Buy Used: $8.75
You Save: $21.24 (71%)
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Rating:  714 reviews
Sales Rank: 87
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 300
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2
ISBN: 0066620996
Dewey Decimal Number: 658
EAN: 9780066620992
ASIN: 0066620996
Publication Date: October 2001
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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
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?
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| Customer Reviews: Read 45 more reviews...
 Interesting look at leadership. CD media great for long drives. January 6, 2009
I. Portscheller (Saint Louis)
I read the book a while back and was surprised to find parallels to what my dad and uncle (partners in a small business) experienced in the late 70s/early 80s. I knew they did something special, but it was especially gratifying to see it documented and quasi-proven with multiple industry observations on larger scales. I purchased the CD media so that my dad could enjoy it as well.
Collins Review December 25, 2008
Ob (New Brunswick, NJ)
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!
 please burn every copy you can find December 21, 2008
CHO, Chief Heretical Officer (India, for now)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 was, and still is, considered the Gospel of business. Prior to G2G we grew from zero to $120M in 10 years. In the 7 years after G2G we are down to $60M. (Still profitable, thankfully, but boring.) Life was much more fun before we got hedge-hogged.
Avoid at all costs, unless you are a fox and read it to learn what the hedge hogs are thinking.
 Pretty great, if a little dated December 16, 2008
J. Bosiljevac (san fran, ca)
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 tendencies.
LEADERSHIP All the companies had what Collins calls "Level 5 leaders," or leaders with a rare combination of drive and ambition but a complete lack of ego. These leaders are humble, quick to credit others, and are driven by a desire to create something bigger than themselves as opposed to a monument to themselves. These leaders shun the cult of personality and are very rarely rock-star CEOs. In fact, Collins found no correlation between CEO pay and good-to-great companies.
WHO OVER WHAT Good-to-great companies first concern themselves with who they bring on board before decide what needs to be done. The right team can accomplish anything, but even the best game plan will fail if it doesn't have the right people to implement it.
CONFRONT THE BRUTAL FACTS The g2g companies had a culture of optimistic realism. They had a culture of trust and honesty, where people were empowered to do their jobs and debate was encouraged. Goals were set high, but they never lost sight of the situation on the ground.
THE HEDGEHOG CONCEPT refers to a parable in which a hedgehog constantly foils a fox by repeatedly doing the same simple thing--being a hedgehog. In business, it simply means finding your company's core competency. What can it be best in the world at? What can it make money at? What is it passionate about? Great companies find and stick to that one thing.
GOOD TO GREAT also describes the culture of discipline in each company, the adaption to new technology, and the cycles of positive and negative momentum that companies find themselves in. All of these elements work together to create the leap to greatness over time. It's not a singular breakthrough.
Scattered throughout the book are great case studies, inspirational stories and insightful quotes. My biggest criticism of the book, or observation, is that a couple of the eleven great companies (Fannie Mae and Circuit City) either forgot what made them great or weren't as sustainable as Collins thought seven years ago. That aside, this was an easy read full of a lot of good insight.
Captivating for a Business Study December 15, 2008
Frank M. A. Buck (Brighton, MI)
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.
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