Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Jim Collins and his research team spent five years asking a question most business books assume the answer to: can a merely good company become a great one, and if so, what did the ones that managed it have in common? Good to Great is the answer they arrived at, drawn from a comparison study rather than a hunch.

What the book covers

• Level 5 leadership: the combination of personal humility and professional will found in every transition company
• First who, then what: assembling the right people before setting direction
• Confront the brutal facts while retaining faith in the eventual outcome — the Stockdale Paradox
• The Hedgehog Concept: the intersection of what you can be best at, what drives your economics, and what you are deeply passionate about
• A culture of discipline, and technology as accelerator rather than cause
• The flywheel effect, and why transformation never has a single dramatic moment

Who it’s for

Executives, founders and managers thinking about long-term organisational performance, and business students. Worth reading alongside later critiques of the study’s method — several of the featured companies subsequently struggled, which is itself instructive.

Edition details

• Author: Jim Collins
• Publisher: Random House Business
• Format: Hardcover
• ISBN: 978-0712676090
• Language: English

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