Good to Great Return to Book Review Page Return to Home Page

By Jim Collins

HarperCollins 2001

This book holds some small hope that remote enclaves on the corporate landscape might be gain immunity to the bureaucratic infection diagnosed by Scott Adams in The Dilbert Principle.

Scholar Jim Collins and a team or researchers based this effort on an interesting premise: There are a few great corporations in the U.S., but there are many more “good” corporations; so it would benefit the many good ones to know the how some of their number became great. To eliminate any bias in the good-to-great selection process, the team based it strictly on stock market performance. The criterion for selection was that a company experience 15 years of average performance followed by 15 years of great performance. Surprisingly, the list was not dominated by technology companies. Firms from industries such as steel manufacturing, paper products marketing, tobacco and a retail drugstore chain made the list.

The best lesson from the book is on the personalities and management styles of the chief executive officers who managed the firms during the transition periods. Small egos with narrowly focused styles dominate the list. And anyone who has ever hired a person who wasn’t completely appropriate for a job because a vacancy needed filling will close this book with a certain degree of shame.

While most of the firms’ greatness was achieved by growth, in some cases it could at least partially be attributed to a “beach-ball effect” (hold a beach ball under water, then let it go and it will pop into the air by itself). But shouldn’t a management that achieves growth by identifying and eliminating the factors that have held a company back deserve as much credit as one that propels a company’s expansion by mapping out new courses of action?

The shortcoming of the book is that despite the rigorous selection process, some of the companies tanked before the ink had dried on the book’s pages. This can distract the reader into looking for the emerging negative loops that the author had missed that would subsequently halt growth.