Good is the Enemy of Great
How to make the transition from good to great?
This book, “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t” by Jim Collins — co-author of the book “Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies” with Jerry I. Porras — was first published in 2001 and has sold millions of copies. It still sells more than 200,000 copies every year. It ranks #3 in Strategic Management and #7 in Business Systems & Planning categories of Amazon’s Book sales ranking.
Collins and his team focused on eleven companies, selected among 1,435 companies, including well-known ones such as Circuit City, Wells Fargo, and Gillette that were able to renovate themselves and make the transition from ‘good’ to ‘great’.
All these eleven companies showed the following basic pattern: Fifteen-year cumulative stock returns at or below the general stock market –where you cannot just be lucky for fifteen years- punctuated by a transition point, then cumulative returns at least three times the market over the next fifteen years.
To reach the key findings and way to greatness, Collins and his 21-person research team contributed 15,000 hours of work to the project, read and systematically coded nearly 6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts, and created 384 million bytes of…
