Good to Great

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't is a management book by Jim C. Collins that describes how companies transition from being good companies to great companies, and how most companies fail to make the transition. The book was a bestseller, selling four million copies and going far beyond the traditional audience of business books.[1] The book was published on October 16, 2001.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
Front cover
AuthorJim C. Collins
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
SubjectCorporate strategy
GenreNon-fiction
PublisherHarperCollins
Publication date
October 16, 2001
Media typeHardcover
Pages320
ISBN978-0-06-662099-2
OCLC46835556
658 21
LC ClassHD57.7 .C645 2001

The Good to Great companies

Great companies and their comparators

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 CompanyComparator
Abbott LaboratoriesUpjohn
Circuit City StoresSilo
Fannie MaeGreat Western Bank
Gillette Company (now a Procter & Gamble brand)Warner-Lambert Co
Kimberly-ClarkScott Paper Company
KrogerA&P (declared bankruptcy in 2010 and 2015; all supermarkets sold or shut down in 2015)
NucorBethlehem Steel
Philip MorrisR. J. Reynolds
Pitney BowesAddressograph
WalgreensEckerd
Wells FargoBank of America

Unsustained companies

Collins includes 6 examples of companies that did not sustain their change to greatness. These companies, "... are looked at separately as a clump":[2]

Unsustained Comparisons
Burroughs
Chrysler
Harris
Hasbro
Rubbermaid
Teledyne

Response

Praise

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' perspectives on running a business are amazingly simple and commonsense".[4]

Criticism

Holt and Cameron state the book provides a "generic business recipe" that ignores "particular strategic opportunities and challenges."[5]

Steven D. Levitt noted that some of the companies selected as "great" have since gotten into serious trouble, such as Circuit City and Fannie Mae, 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.[6] Levitt concludes that books like this are "mostly backward-looking" and can't offer a guide for the future."[7]

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

See also

References
  1. Bryant, Adam (May 23, 2009). "For This Guru, No Question Is Too Big". New York Times.
  2. "Good to Great".
  3. Alan Murray (2010). The Wall Street Journal Essential Guide to Management. New York: HarperCollins. pp. 11. ISBN 978-0-06-184033-3.
  4. "GOOD TO GREAT: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... And Others Don't (Review)". September 3, 2001. Retrieved 2012-07-13.
  5. Holt, Douglas; Cameron, Douglas (2010). Cultural Strategy. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-958740-7.
  6. "Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias". 17 August 2009.
  7. Levitt, Steven D. (2008-07-28). "From Good to Great … to Below Average". Freakonomics.
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