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| Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't | 
 enlarge | Author: Jim Collins
Publisher: Collins Business
Category: Book
List Price: $27.50
Buy New: $6.65
You Save: $20.85 (76%)
Buy New/Used/Collectible from $6.73
Avg. Customer Rating:  (702 reviews)
Sales Rank: 60
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 300
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
Release Date: October 16, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 697 more reviews...
 Good to Great October 1, 2008
This book is easy and interesting reading. Not only is it required text for my class, but the Vice President of the company that I work for actually told me to read it. Imagine her surprise when I informed her that it was required reading for my masters in social work class.
Good to Great review September 29, 2008
Great practical ideas. How refreshing it is to see a passionate individual pursue an idea to completion and take the time to fully investigate all possibilities.
It's been a great addition to my book club at work.
 Worth for its price September 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I don't need much to write here as hundreds of people has written review for this book.
In simple terms the book is easy to read & understand. Analyze how best companies manage to retain their position by innovative & intelligent leadership. Research is sound & findings are really interesting. This book would be useful for any leader (or follower) even if they are not into financial sector.
The concept of "Good is the enemy of Great" struck me the most
Definitely worth for its price.
 Mediocre at best September 19, 2008
After many years of ignoring the hype about this book (it admittedly has a great name) I buckled and read it. It was o.k. I did find some useful facts and anecdotes in it but for the most part it reminded me of esoteric research papers that I was forced to read in med school and residency -- crammed with #'s and statistics and graphs, but relatively little in the way of real-life applicable insights. Worth a quick perusal. The books by Trout and Ries are much better.
 Master bamboozler September 12, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
I did not finish this book. Many may argue reviewers should not review books that they have not read entirely, but I think it would ultimately benefit potential readers if even those who started books reviewed them. Maybe then Amazon book reviews would not be so skewed to 5-star reviews. Now on to why I did not like this book.
As a former management consultant, I appreciated the techniques the author used to make what he was saying sound important such as using fancy charts and graphs and writing in business lingo with little substance. The author also sets the stage by self-aggrandizing. In the first page he ruminates about how much someone would have to pay him in order not to publish the book. Apparently even 100 million dollars would not stop him from publishing his work. Now if this were a truly amazing book and research, why not let the readers decide instead of telling them how great it is going to be? Mr. Collins is smart, however. He knows self-aggrandizing works. Human beings fall for those pretensions all the time. Sales people use those strategies all the time. I don't believe that the author is trying to deceive readers and I am sure he genuinely believes his own material. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." (quote by physicist, Richard Phillips Feynman).
Collins looks at 11 companies that have achieved success and tries to explain what drove them to that success. This is a meaningless exercise. Every situation is unique and more importantly it has little application to the real world. If it did, then why hasn't he been able to predict the future successful companies and become rich by investing in them? If you are not convinced by my review, consider this: one of those "good to great" companies that is studied in the book is Fannie Mae. Enough said!
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