Book Review: Good to Great
Posted on January 1st, 2007 by Paul McArdle – 14 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:
|
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
Check back later…
Chapter 6) A culture of discipline
Check back later…
Chapter 7) Technology accelerators
Check back later…
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[...] I have learnt the hard way that it’s often better for these types of “non-believers” to be moved “Off the Bus”, for everyone’s benefit. [...]
[...] book was written before “Good to Great” (from [...]
[...] The bus analogy again. Without citing Jim Collins’ book, this author (from p157) provides a similar analogy to the way [...]
[...] me, this sounds like the concept of “Level 5 Leadership” written about [...]
[...] not to say that we have a bad bunch of employees currently – just that we’ve had to do a bit of “getting the right people on the bus” in the past, and probably will have to do more in [...]
[...] more productively spent reading a number of other books written in the same manner – particularly “Good to Great” and “Built to Last”, and (as noted above) the author’s earlier [...]
[...] 2, some of our malaise has stemmed from ineffective communication of “where the bus is going” (as per Jim Collins) to internal and external [...]
[...] have read Jim Collins recommend that “getting the right people on the bus” is on of the first, and most critical, decisions that any business owner/CEO can [...]
[...] my mind, there are two sides to this coin.
[...] In “Good to Great”, Jim Collins talk about determining where the bus is headed. [...]
[...] In “Good to Great”, Jim Collins calls this “getting the right people on the bus” … and th…. [...]
[...] Hence, I have bundled all of these concepts under the broader label “where this bus is headed”, which I have adopted from the book “Good to Great”. [...]
[...] 2010, we’re recruiting a couple of key individuals (getting the “right people on the bus”) to help us drive the bus as indicated [...]
[...] have also recognised the importance of getting the right people “on the bus” (from Good to Great) as a prerequisite for us to be able to deliver on these objectives.