Book Review: Good to Great
Posted in 01 - Leadership & Management, 02 - People & Culture, Book Review on January 1st, 2007 by Paul McArdle – 20 Comments.
I first read this book some time prior to 2007 (and we formally reviewed the book after we had moved into our new office in September 2007).
Hence, to put this review in context, I have used artistic licence with the post date…
Binary Review
This is an excellent book:
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The Book |
What we thought |
 “Good to Great” by Jim Collins |
 A great book!(pardon the pun) |
| Full Disclosure – yes, that’s a tracked link to Amazon shown above. We buy quite a large number of books on a wide range of topics, all relevant to our business in some way. If you did happen to purchase the book from Amazon, they’d throw a few shekels our way, which would help us to buy (and hence publish reviews of) even more books. Hence, Karma would return the benefits to you… |
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At this stage, the following review is from memory.
Method in the Book:
The book is a follow-on from “Built to Last”.
The authors (and their team of analysts) identified US companies that had been transformed from “Good” performance to “Great” performance, and had sustained that performance over some period (can’t recall off the top of my head – perhaps >15 years, to try to avoid skewed results because of the performance of an individual CEO). The authors used stock market returns as the ultimate indicator of performance.
Once these companies had been identified, the authors (and their team of analysts) spent considerable time delving into the detail, trying to understand why it was that these companies had been transformed to deliver outstanding (& sustained) performance.
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The Main Findings:
As a result of this analysis, the authors identified a number of core principles that seemed to be uniform across all of the transformations they researched.
I will fill in the other details, when I get the chance:
Chapter 2) Level 5 Leadership
Check back later…
Chapter 3) Getting the right people on the bus
The authors expressed surprise that the general sequence of events was “first who, then where” – in other words, get the right people on the bus AND in the right seats BEFORE you sit down and work out where the business should really be headed.
Chapter 4) Confront the brutal facts BUT never lose faith
Check back later…
Chapter 5) The Hedgehog Concept
In the book, the “hedgehog concept” is used to describe a company focus centered on the intersection of three circles:
(a) What are we passionate about?
(b) What can we be the best in the world at?
(c) What drives our resource or economic engine.Essentially, any sustainable business resolves to finding an answer to that question - and then focusing on that area.
Chapter 6) A culture of discipline
Check back later…
Chapter 7) Technology accelerators
Check back later…
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