Good to Great

Customer Reviews

• 1 out of 5
  
  
  by Jamie from The United States | Jul 31, 2008
  

  This book by Jim Collins is one of the most successful books to be found in the "Business" section of your local megabookstore, and given how it purports to tell you how to take a merely good company and make it great, it's not difficult to see why that might be so. Collins and his crack team of researchers say they swam through stacks of business literature in search of info on how to pull this feat off, and came up with a list of great companies that illustrate some concepts central to the puzzle. They also present for each great company what they call a "comparison company," which is kind of that company with a goatee and a much less impressive earnings record. The balance of the book is spent expanding on pithy catch phrases that describe the great companies, like "First Who, Then What" or "Be a Hedgehog" or "Grasp the Flywheel, not the Doom Loop." No, no, I'm totally serious.
  
  I've got several problems with this book, the biggest of which stem from fundamentally viewpoints on how to do research. Collin's brand of research is not my kind. It's not systematic, it's not replicable, it's not generalizable, it's not systematic, it's not free of bias, it's not model driven, and it's not collaborative. It's not, in short, scientific in any way. That's not to say that other methods of inquiry are without merit --the Harvard Business Review makes pretty darn good use of case studies, for example-- but way too often Collins's great truths seemed like square pegs crammed into round holes, because a round hole is what he wants. For example, there's no reported search for information that disconfirms his hypotheses. Are there other companies that don't make use of a Culture of Discipline (Chapter 6, natch) but yet are still great according to Collins's definition? Are there great companies that fail to do some of the things he says should make them great? The way that the book focuses strictly on pairs of great/comparison companies smacks of confirmatory information bias, which is a kink in the human mind that drives us to seek out and pay attention to information that confirms our pre-existing suppositions and ignore information that fails to support them.
  
  Relatedly, a lot of the book's themes and platitudes strike me as owing their popularity to the same factors that make the horoscope or certain personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator so popular: they're so general and loosely defined that almost anyone can look at that and not only say that wow, that make sense, and I've always felt the same way! This guy and me? We're geniuses! The chapter about "getting the right people on the bus" that extols the virtue of hiring really super people is perhaps the most obvious example. Really, did anyone read this part and think "Oh, man. I've been hiring half retarded chimps. THAT'S my problem! I should hire GOOD people!" Probably not, and given that Collins doesn't go into any detail about HOW to do this or any of his other good to great pro tips, I'm not really sure where the value is supposed to be.
  
  It also irked me that Good to Great seems to try and exist in a vacuum, failing to relate its findings to any other body of research except Collins's other book, Built to Last. The most egregious example of this is early on in Chapter 2 where Collins talks about his concept of "Level 5 Leadership," which characterizes those very special folks who perch atop a supposed leadership hierarchy. The author actually goes into some detail describing Level 5 leaders, but toward the end of the chapter he just shrugs his figurative shoulders and says "But we don't know how people get to be better leaders. Some people just are." Wait, what? People in fields like Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Organizational Development have been studying, scientifically, what great leaders do and how to do it for decades. We know TONS about how to become a better leader. There are entire industries built around it. You would think that somebody on the Good to Great research team may have done a cursory Google search on this.
  
  So while Good to Great does have some interesting thoughts and a handful of amusing or even fascinating stories to tell about the companies it profiles (I liked, for example, learning about why Walgreens opens so many shops in the same area, even to the point of having stores across the street from each other in some cities), ultimately it strikes me as vague generalities and little to no practical information about how to actually DO anything to make your company great.

  
  
   4 people found this review helpful
  
  

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• 3 out of 5
  
  
  by Giuliana from The United States | Feb 18, 2008
  

  If you watched the corresponding documentary on PBS, you probably won't need to read this book. If you haven't, then maybe you might be interested in how certain companies manage to turn from good to great (i.e., from reasonable profit to outstanding performances that outshine established market leaders). You aren't? Well, you should, because the golden rules presented in this book can be applied to almost all aspects of life.
  
  Alec, who is responsible for buying this book*, commented on the second rule of good-to-great companies: first find the right people, THEN figure out what you want to do. He commented that good marriages follow this principle. It seems self-evident, but too many people choose their spouses because they think it's time for them to get married or because they think their spouse would be a good parent/house-cleaner/event-organizer.
  
  The author also reveals that all good-to-great companies are led by humble and inquisitive CEOs that seldom use the pronoun "I" (and related pronouns and adjectives) to describe the success of their companies. These leaders are selfless and hard-working, willing to listen, act on problems, and encourage discussion. It made me think how these characteristics are now forgotten in the political world. (Once again, I think our embarrassingly self-inflated Silvio Berlusconi.)
  
  
  *Alec didn't buy Good to Great to test our home finances. He was comparing his ideas of smart economics with those of Jim Collins. He might still open his dream restaurant, after all.
  
  

  
  
   4 people found this review helpful
  
  

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• 5 out of 5
  
  
  by Allen from Danville, PA | Nov 18, 2007
  

  I started reading it and then gave it to my boss. I'm currently listening to the audio book but I would like to own a hardcover copy.
  
  The concept that has struck me as most applicable (so far), particularly with respect to businesses, is the need to get the right people on the team first and in the right positions, then decide what to do. Managers should not waste time and energy motivating people to excellence. Instead, they should give self-motivating people a vision they can support and work hard to bring to realization. Fewer great people on the team are better than lots of mediocre people. The mediocre people just make extra work for the great people and the net result is "good". It's easier to be great than good.
  
  Another interesting concept I've been told about, but haven't read about yet, is the flywheel. Progress is made by implementing small changes at opportune times. Momentum is gained slowly and steadily by these small, periodic decisions. The image used by Collins is that of a flywheel with lots of inertia. Each little push eases the flywheel ahead. The wheel starts rotating slowly but as little pushes continue to be made, the wheel picks up momentum and is hard to stop. This concept is seen in the growth that companies like Google have experienced. Google started out as just a slightly better search engine. Small changes at opportune times have turned it into the booming multi-service company that it is today.

  
  
   4 people found this review helpful
  
  

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• 1 out of 5
  
  
  by Sergei from Bedford, MA | Nov 23, 2007
  

  This is yet another example of somebody trying to come up with a "how-to" looking into the proverbial rear-view mirror. All successes are infinitely unique. This book would be so-so as a "memoir" of particular companies, but in its attempt to extrapolate from that into some sort of a manual of how to run a business it becomes completely useless.
  
  True, it has some common sense thoughts, but they are so obvious and, hmm... common sense that if you haven't thought of them before reading this book you probably shouldn't try to run a business or manage people.
  
  My personal experience with 6 people who said it was a "must" only confirms this - all of them were at best mediocre and two actually managed to take Good to Bust.

  
  
   2 people found this review helpful
  
  

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• 3 out of 5
  
  
  by Deli from The United States | Aug 25, 2007
  

  OK, so I'm making my way through this book... painfully, slowly, pyromaniacly.... and, I do have to say it is FANTASTIC if you find yourself surrounded by people without common sense. Of course, I don't have a business degree... oh, wait, I'm not supposed to have common sense.
  
  Anyways, now that I've trailed off into ADD tangents, my boss gave me this book to read and I do like the principles. I have one thing to say: way better than the teaching books I used to have to read. GEESH!

  
  
   3 people found this review helpful
  
  

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