After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness - why some companies make the leap and others don't. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap.Summary: Built to Last showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. Quotes by Jim Collins Companies that change best over time know first and foremost what should not change.

Not that we should become leadership atheists (leadership does matter), but every time we throw our hands up in frustration - reverting back to 'well, the answer must be Leadership!' - we prevent ourselves from gaining deeper, more scientific understanding about what makes great companies tick.” Similarly, every time we attribute everything to 'Leadership,' we're no different from the people in the 1500's. Not that we become atheists, but we gained deeper understanding about how the universe ticks. Why did we have an earthquake? God did it.īut with the Enlightenment, we began the search for a more scientific understanding - physics, chemistry, biology and so forth. In the 1500's, people ascribed all events they didn't understand to God. HarperBusiness, 27.50 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-06-662099-2 In what Collins terms a prequel to the bestseller Built to Last he wrote with Jerry Porras, this.

“To use an analogy, the 'leadership is the answer to everything' perspective is the modern equivalent of the, 'God is the answer to everything' perspective that held back our scientific understanding of the physical world in the Dark Ages.

Good to great by james c collins