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Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't Hardcover – October 16, 2001
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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?
- Print length400 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarperBusiness
- Publication dateOctober 16, 2001
- Dimensions6.12 x 1.05 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-109780066620992
- ISBN-13978-0066620992
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Review
One of the top ten business books of 2001 — Business Week
About the Author
Jim Collins is a student and teacher of what makes great companies tick, and a Socratic advisor to leaders in the business and social sectors. Having invested more than a quarter-century in rigorous research, he has authored or coauthored six books that have sold in total more than 10 million copies worldwide. They include Good to Great, Built to Last, How the Mighty Fall, and Great by Choice.
Driven by a relentless curiosity, Jim began his research and teaching career on the faculty at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992. In 1995, he founded a management laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.
In addition to his work in the business sector, Jim has a passion for learning and teaching in the social sectors, including education, healthcare, government, faith-based organizations, social ventures, and cause-driven nonprofits.
In 2012 and 2013, he had the honor to serve a two-year appointment as the Class of 1951 Chair for the Study of Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point. In 2017, Forbes selected Jim as one of the 100 Greatest Living Business Minds.
Jim has been an avid rock climber for more than forty years and has completed single-day ascents of El Capitan and Half Dome in Yosemite Valley.
Learn more about Jim and his concepts at his website, where you’ll find articles, videos, and useful tools. jimcollins.com
Product details
- ASIN : 0066620996
- Publisher : HarperBusiness; First Edition (October 16, 2001)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 400 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780066620992
- ISBN-13 : 978-0066620992
- Item Weight : 1.1 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.12 x 1.05 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #785 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3 in Systems & Planning
- #22 in Business Management (Books)
- #39 in Leadership & Motivation
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

Jim Collins is a student and teacher of what makes great companies tick, and a Socratic advisor to leaders in the business and social sectors. Having invested more than a quarter century in rigorous research, he has authored or coauthored a series of books that have sold in total more than 10 million copies worldwide. They include Good to Great, the #1 bestseller, which examines why some companies make the leap and others don’t; the enduring classic Built to Last, which discovers why some companies remain visionary for generations; How the Mighty Fall, which delves into how once-great companies can self-destruct; and Great by Choice, which uncovers the leadership behaviors for thriving in chaos and uncertainty. Jim has also published two monographs that extend the ideas in his primary books: Good to Great and the Social Sectors and Turning the Flywheel.
His most recent publication is BE 2.0 (Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0), an ambitious upgrade of his very first book; it returns Jim to his original focus on small, entrepreneurial companies and honors his coauthor and mentor Bill Lazier.
Driven by a relentless curiosity, Jim began his research and teaching career on the faculty at the 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 conducts research and engages with CEOs and senior-leadership teams.
In addition to his work in the business sector, Jim has a passion for learning and teaching in the social sectors, including education, healthcare, government, faith-based organizations, social ventures, and cause-driven nonprofits. In 2012 and 2013, he had the honor to serve a two-year appointment as the Class of 1951 Chair for the Study of Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Jim holds a bachelor's degree in mathematical sciences and an MBA from Stanford University, and honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Colorado and the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. In 2017, Forbes selected Jim as one of the 100 Greatest Living Business Minds.
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I Give this book 4 stars. I did drop one star for the abundance of repeated information. Information was summarized, a detailed chart was shown, then the chart was tiresomely recounted in sentence form.
Overall I recommend this book to leaders in all professions as a reminder to keep honing in on your purpose and bring along only those people who can see, support, and champion that purpose from their own initiative.
A well-written synopsis of 11 “great” companies and some of their similar characteristics, this is a fun, quick read that is great in terms of party trivia and information… but it’s tougher to judge if you’re looking for more of a business how-to. Partially, it has aged poorly — many of the companies selected have since had meltdowns of epic proportions (for example: Fannie Mae, Circuit City), and the “how to” part of the book feels generalized and far more subjective than the methodology/selection criteria would have you believe. Still, you’ll learn quite a few fun facts about how some of these business started and/or converted to become the giants they are today.
Greater Detail:
The main premise of this book is that though there are many very successful, long-lasting corporations out there (Coca Cola, GE, etc), there are a handful of companies that transcend just long-lasting durability, and become truly “great” companies. The selection criteria (mostly explained in the appendices) identified 11 “great” companies out of 1,435 analyzed, mostly via things like stock performance (the companies chosen were at about market average for about 15 years, and then jumped to being about seven times better than market over a period of 15 years, hence the title: good to great).
The idea was to then take a more in-depth look at the 11 companies to see what similarities existed, and to then compile kind of a how-to in terms of what distinguishes the greats. Some of the ideas explored are things like:
1. The Level 5 Leader — Collins proposes the idea of a leadership hierarchy of skills; a Level 5 leader is a dual personality of sorts — someone who is basically modest, but willful and stubborn, almost introverted and shy, but simultaneously fearless (this is kind of the opposite of say the CEO-centric view where Apple was in part defined by Steve Jobs as a leader and a personality, Bill Gates by Microsoft, etc). He argues that the Level 5 leader is someone who does what’s in the best interests of the company — no matter what (preparing for crises before they happen, sacrificing part of their lives often, etc). Counter examples given are leaders who so define the role that they’re unable to appoint successors, or have a successful successor — the argument here is about systematic management, filling the role that the company needs, for the good of the company, and almost without personal ego.
2. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop — Even though the media sometimes portrays changes as though they’re instantaneously effective or immediately impactful, in reality, most companies that are successful slowly build momentum via a flywheel effect, constantly confronting the “brutal” truths and having faith that with discipline and continued effort and momentum, a breakthrough will happen. The Doom Loop is when there is a lack of patience that leads to continued cycles of new leaders, new directions, and new innovations, without ever waiting to see something through.
3. The Hedgehog Concept — This is the concept of doing one thing really, really well. Here the argument is that you don’t have to be the best at everything, that Walgreens became a great company by getting rid of its restaurants (it had over 500 at one point) and focusing on what it was strongest in — being a convenient drug store. It focused on location, location, location (always being on a corner, for example), offering 24-hour pharmacies, flu shots, expanding into poorer neighborhoods, and being an almost pervasively convenient option for its customers. It basically asks companies to think about what they can really be best at and specialize a little, find something they are passionate about that they can truly excel at.
As I’ve said, it’s an interesting read. and in terms of things to make you think, there’s a lot of good cocktail party fodder — is it better to have an invisible leader who sacrifices everything for their company? Or is there benefit to having a targeted leader to focus on (the Zuckerbergs and Jobses, leaders who are synonymous with a company’s image). But if you’re reading it now, more than a decade after its initial publication, it’s hard to take it as seriously when it talks about Fannie Mae (which has gone through a federal takeover/bailout) or Circuit City (which has filed for bankruptcy) or even Wells Fargo, which has had its share of legal and financial troubles. Also, though it’s a nice retroactive, backwards-looking book about what has helped 11 particular companies, it’s hard to know how much is truly applicable going forward. So in that sense, it’s less of a how to go from good to great, and more of an interesting, almost historical read, about how these particular companies made the jump (and then sometimes plummeted back).
Comparisons to Other Books:
I had a similar experience with Collins’s Built to Last, which was supposed to detail the successful habits of “visionary” companies. It was a fun synopsis of a six-year research project by Stanford, and I learned all sorts of interesting trivia, but, as with many books that are backwards-looking studies of still-in-business companies, it’s sometimes hard to take the overarching messages seriously knowing how some of the chosen companies have performed since publication. I think these are great books if you’re looking to read something interesting about the business world, but I’m not sure I’d really call them instructive per se.
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古典に属して内容は書くまでもないが 会社を集団としては考えた時にどこから手をつけるべきか示唆をもらえる

