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Good
to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
by James C. Collins
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 Amazon.com
Hardcover: 320 pages
HarperCollins; ISBN: 0066620996; (October 16, 2001)
Book 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?
Built
to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
by James C. Collins, Jerry I. Porras
This analysis of what makes great companies great has been hailed everywhere
as an instant classic and one of the best business titles since In Search
of Excellence. The authors, James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, spent
six years in research, and they freely admit that their own preconceptions
about business success were devastated by their actual findings--along
with the preconceptions of virtually everyone else.
Built to Last identifies 18 "visionary" companies and sets out to determine
what's special about them. To get on the list, a company had to be world
famous, have a stellar brand image, and be at least 50 years old. We're
talking about companies that even a layperson knows to be, well, different:
the Disneys, the Wal-Marts, the Mercks.
Whatever the key to the success of these companies, the key to the success
of this book is that the authors don't waste time comparing them to business
failures. Instead, they use a control group of "successful-but-second-rank"
companies to highlight what's special about their 18 "visionary" picks.
Thus Disney is compared to Columbia Pictures, Ford to GM, Hewlett Packard
to Texas Instruments, and so on.
The core myth, according to the authors, is that visionary companies
must start with a great product and be pushed into the future by charismatic
leaders. There are examples of that pattern, they admit: Johnson &
Johnson, for one. But there are also just too many counterexamples--in
fact, the majority of the "visionary" companies, including giants like
3M, Sony, and TI, don't fit the model. They were characterized by total
lack of an initial business plan or key idea and by remarkably self-effacing
leaders. Collins and Porras are much more impressed with something else
they shared: an almost cult-like devotion to a "core ideology" or identity,
and active indoctrination of employees into "ideologically commitment"
to the company.
The comparison with the business "B"-team does tend to raise a significant
methodological problem: which companies are to be counted as "visionary"
in the first place? There's an air of circularity here, as if you achieve
"visionary" status by ... achieving visionary status. So many roads lead
to Rome that the book is less practical than it might appear. But that's
exactly the point of an eloquent chapter on 3M. This wildly successful
company had no master plan, little structure, and no prima donnas. Instead
it had an atmosphere in which bright people were both keen to see the company
succeed and unafraid to "try a lot of stuff and keep what works." --Richard
Farr - Amazon.com
Paperback from HarperBusiness
Book Published: 20 August, 2002
The
Spirit to Serve Marriott's Way
by Adrian Zackheim, J. W., Jr. Marriott, Jim Collins, Kathi Ann Brown
Paperback from HarperCollins
Book Published: 01 January, 2001
BEYOND
ENTREPRENEURSHIP: TURNING YOUR BUSN
by Collins & lazier
Paperback from Prentice Hall Press
Book Published: 21 September, 1995
The Startup Garden: How Growing a Business Grows You
by Tom Ehrenfeld
Foreword by Jim Collins
Listed Here
About the Author
Jim Collins is a student and teacher of enduring great companies --
how they grow, how they attain superior performance, and how good companies
can become great companies.Having invested over a decade of research into
the topic, Jim has co-authored three books, including the classic Built
to Last, a fixture on the Business Week bestseller list for more than five
years, generating over 70 printings and translations into 16 languages.His
work has been featured in Fortune, The Economist, Business Week, USA Today,
Industry Week, Inc., Harvard Business Review and Fast Company.
Driven by a relentless curiosity, Jim began his research and teaching
career on the faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he
received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992.In 1995, he founded a
management laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, where he now conducts multi-year
research projects and works with executives from the private, public, and
social sectors.
Jim has served as a teacher to senior executives and CEOs at corporations
that include: Starbucks Coffee, Merck, Patagonia, American General, W.L.
Gore, and hundreds more.He has also worked with the non-corporate sector
such as the Leadership Network of Churches, Johns Hopkins Medical School,
the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and The Peter F. Drucker Foundation
for Non-Profit Management.
Jim invests a significant portion of his energy in large-scale research
projects -- often five or more years in duration -- to develop fundamental
insights and then translate those findings into books, articles and lectures.He
uses his management laboratory to work directly with executives and to
develop practical tools for applying the concepts that flow from his research.
In addition, Jim is an avid rock climber and has made free ascents of
the West Face of El Capitan and the East Face of Washington Column in Yosemite
Valley.
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