Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, Jim Collins. HarperCollins, 2001.
Collins and his team set criteria for how to identify a good company that became great (a transformation sustaining value substantially above its industry). By looking at the common strategies, they derived several rules:
Disciplined People:
- “Level 5 leadership”: “a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.”
- “First who, then what”: get the right people in the right position, and the wrong people out.
Disciplined Thought:
- “Confront the brutal facts (but never lose faith)” (“The Stockdale Paradox”)
- “The hedgehog concept (Simplicity within the three circles)”: “A hedgehog knows one thing.” Stay within the intersection of “What you are deeply passionate about,” “What you can be the best in the world at,” and “What drives your economic engine.”
Disciplined Action:
- “A culture of discipline”
- “Technology accelerators” (not drivers)
Finally:
- The flywheel and the doom loop”: Good-to-great is an accumulation of small successes, not flailing around looking for big ones.
- “From Good to Great to Built to Last“
These all seem like good ideals. The only problem I have is that it’s a retrospective study. (It’s like getting a bunch of people to flip coins, then noticing that the person who flipped heads every time is a bald optimist with green eyes: it’s not necessarily the attributes that lead to the result.) Some of the characteristics can only be assessed retrospectively, so they have a flavor of being self-fulfilling (you thought you had a hedgehog strategy, but it didn’t work out, so it must not have been).
With those limitations in mind, this book is thought-provoking about what really makes for greatness.
(Reviewed Jan., ’03)