GOOD TO GREAT
GOOD TO GREAT by Jim Collins
Overview
This book discusses why some companies have consistently beat the market over a long period of time, and what traits are common amongst such “great” companies, as compared to merely “good” companies.
Chapter 1. Good is the Enemy of Great This chapter serves as an introduction to the criteria for “Great” companies, and offers a preview of what traits will be discussed in more detail throughout the rest of the book. The companies which were considered “great” were public companies whose stock prices had been approximately equal to their industry average for many years, after which their stock took off and tripled the market for at least 15 years in a row. Of the several thousand companies surveyed, only 11 met such stringent criteria. These companies were not centered around any given “hot” industry, but rather had certain traits in common. If you were simply to look at what these companies had in common, it wouldn’t necessarily tell you very much. As an analogy, if you looked at what all Olympic athletes had in common, you could say they all had coaches. Yet you want to determine what the “great” companies had in common, that comparison “good” companies didn’t have. Essentially what’s different about the “great” companies. As such, the authors picked representative “good” companies for comparison. The authors started with no hypothesis, and just explored the data, seeing what trends emerged. These included the following traits:
The CEO’s came from within the company itself. Better corporate strategy was not a distinguishing factor in the great companies. They were not necessarily in great industries. The leaders were more down to earth like Abraham Lincoln, rather than ego-centric like Caesar. The companies focused on getting the right people first, and then working on the business.
The companies had unwavering faith, yet never discounted the “facts of reality”. The companies all found something that they could be the best in the world at; the good companies all had the “curse of competence”, being “good enough”. With good disciplined people, you have less of a need for a rigid hierarchy. There was not one defining moment of becoming great; rather, it was a buildup, a relentless pushing of a giant heavy flywheel that eventually developed its own momentum.
This book aimed to be timeless, searching for principles that would withstand the test of time. Instead of engineering a specific blueprint that was only applicable at a given time (the book was published in 2001), it searched for the physics underneath all the engineering. There will always be “new economies” in any age (e.g. electricity back in the 1800s), but the key is to define the traits of greats companies regardless of the current economic climate.
Chapter 2. Level 5 Leadership The authors identified 5 levels of leadership that the great CEO’s had. Most “good” companies had Level 4 leaders, and most “great” companies had Level 5 leaders, defined as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
“High Capable Individual” “Contributing Team Member” “Competent Manager” “Effective Leader” “Level 5 Executive”
The Level 5 Executives are described as simultaneously “modest and willful, humble and fearless.” These leaders are more like Lincoln than Caesar in terms of disposition. They have an inner drive to make everything the best it can possibly be, and yet always put the company before their own personal success. While they do have big egos, the difference is that Level 4 leaders have their egos tied up into their personal
www.kibook.club Good to Great (Page 1 of 5)
GOOD TO GREAT by Jim Collins success, while the great companies’ leaders have their egos tied up into the company’s success. They purposefully are not attempting to be big shots, and are humbler than their Level 4 compatriots. Good companies’ leaders had “gargantuan personal egos [which] contributed to demise or mediocrity of company.” Make no mistake, however; the Level 5 leaders had “ferocious resolve” and “stoic determination”, but did not necessarily show it outwardly. They were fanatically driven to produce results because they simply wanted their company to be the bestm at the expense of all else. “Good” company leaders used bad luck as an excuse when things didn’t go well, and believed it was their skill when things turned out well. By comparison, “great” company leaders attributed good luck to things going well, and worked on figuring out what they did wrong (i.e. personal accountability) when things went poorly. Some had extraordinary religious beliefs guiding their resolve, and always worked on creating something larger and more lasting than themselves.
Chapter 3. First Who … Then What In order to best adapt to a fast-changing world, you need the right group of people rather than one great idea. “Good” companies typically had a “genius with a thousand helpers” model, while “great” companies created a team of highly driven and competent employees who would all debate together on how to handle the business. The “great” companies were rigorous, not ruthless. They had less restructurings and layoffs, and cut people quickly who didn’t fit in (essentially get fired quickly, or stay for a long time). Assuming a reasonable baseline compensation, extra compensation had very little correlation to success; the right people are driven to give something their best out of a sense of personal pride.
“Managing problems makes you good, building opportunities makes you great.”
Chapter 4. Confront The Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith) “Good” companies will rest on past laurels. They will say things like “You can’t argue with 100 years of success!”, and are thus unable or unwilling to adapt to a changing world. The “great” companies, on the other hand, had what is described as a:
“A vision for greatness refined with brutal facts of reality.” Those brutal facts were faced head on. The “great” companies would fear external threats more than the “feelings of the managers”. The climate was one in which they would have extraordinary debates about the most terrifying risks. They would ask questions, and get to the core of the issues facing the business. They would have “heated scientific debates”, and would “yell and scream and then emerge with the answer.” The great companies, with the right people, would not be intimidated by competing against larger companies. They would relish in a David versus Goliath moment. They would be made stronger by adversity, excited to “not just survive, but prevail.” The chapter ends with a story about a man named Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war. He epitomized the idea of having both unwavering faith while also confronting the brutal facts. He found ways in which to inspire his fellow prisoners. For example, he recognized that nobody could withstand torture indefinitely (a brutal fact) and developed a system in which the prisoners would divulge certain information after a certain number of minutes. He developed a Morsecode-like system for communicating. When the authors asked what sort of prisoners had gotten the most dispirited, he said “the optimists.” The optimists were the ones who were always disappointing themselves by saying things like “we’ll be home by Christmas”, unwilling to confront the brutal facts. Stockdale, on the
www.kibook.club Good to Great (Page 2 of 5)
GOOD TO GREAT by Jim Collins other hand, always believed he would get home. He was just never naïvely optimistic and foolish enough to put a timeline on it. “Eventually” he would succeed despite the brutal facts; this is the mentality of all the “great” companies surveyed.
Chapter 5. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity Within the Three Circles) The fox would constantly stalk the hedgehog. The fox was wily and had many tricks up his sleeve. Yet every time he would try to attack the hedgehog, the hedgehog would ball up, put his spikes out, and defeat the fox. All the “great” companies could distill their business into one clear, simple, unifying hedgehog concept, from which all the other components of their business stemmed. “Despite the greater cunning of the fox, the hedgehog always wins.” Foxes “never integrate their thinking into one overall concept or unifying vision.” Examples of such integration are: Freud & the unconscious, Darwin & natural selection, Marx & the class struggle, or Einstein & relativity. Do not be fooled into thinking that hedgehogs are simpletons; rather, “they have piercing insight to underlying patterns of complex things.” There’s no evidence “great” companies had better strategies or were in better industries than “good” companies. Rather, they had a hedgehog concept at the intersection of three circles in a Venn diagram: 1. 2. 3.
“Just because business is good at something or makes money, doesn't mean they can be best at it.” #2 was further refined to the formula: Which "X" maximizes "profit per X"? It may seem obvious, but many of the “great” companies went through many iterations defining their “X”. Examples could be “customers”, “stores”, or even “product lines”. The “great” companies did not focus on growth; growth was a natural result of defining their hedgehog concept. Defining it took an average of 4 years to clarify, and was more of an iterative process resulting from heated debates, rather than a clearly defining moment.
The “good” companies were like foxes, and the “great” companies were like hedgehogs.
Chapter 6. A Culture of Discipline When a company starts out, it has all the enthusiasm and zeal of a young scrappy startup. But such a startup will typically “trip over their own disorganized success.” Once you bring in the professionals with MBA’s to “create order out of the startup chaos”, the entrepreneurial spirit is killed. Overly rigid bureaucratic rules are only necessary when you have the wrong people working at the company. “Great” companies made sure they had a culture of discipline, while still maintaining the spirit of creative entrepreneurship.
What you can be the best in the world at? What drives your economic engine? What you are deeply passionate about?
Note that #1 is different from “core competency”. Core competencies are what a company is already good at or already making money at. As such, it is based on the past. Rather, the “great” companies all focused on what they truly could be the best in the world at, in the future.
LOW ENTREPRENEUR SPIRIT
HIGH ENTREPRENEUR SPIRIT
HIGH DISCIPLINE
Hierarchical
“Great” Company
LOW DISCIPLINE
Bureaucratic
Scrappy Startup
You want to develop a disciplined culture using the three circles previously discussed; discipline within the
www.kibook.club Good to Great (Page 3 of 5)
GOOD TO GREAT by Jim Collins hedgehog concept. An analogy is an airline pilot: he has a highly-disciplined rigid system around him, and yet at the end of the day, in turbulent weather he has the autonomy to fly the plane as necessary. First work on getting disciplined people, then disciplined thought, and finally disciplined action, always in that order. “Great” companies had a “culture of discipline”, whereas “good” companies had a single, personally disciplining, Level 4 leader. “Good” companies typically developed bureaucratic cultures to “compensate for incompetence”, or had a “savior” CEO brought in who had sheer force of will. Neither of these create sustainable disciplined cultures.
Chapter 7. Technology Accelerators Technology bubbles always happen. For example, the dot-com boom (and subsequent bust) around the year 2000. “Great” companies used technology to further their hedgehog concept. They used it to accelerate their momentum, not create it. In “great” companies, their hedgehog concept drove the choice of technology, not the other way around. When surveyed about the top 5 most important traits of their business, technology didn’t show up in the “great” companies; rather, concepts such as “consistency”, “culture”, “philosophy”, and “work ethic” were more important. “Great” companies didn’t talk about their technology strategy as a reactionary response to a competitor; instead, they were always focused on what they were trying to create. “Good” companies, on the other hand, were driven by fear. Fear of missing out. Fear of not understanding the latest trends. Fear of “looking like a chump”. “Great” companies avoid tech fads and bandwagons. Yet they carefully consider, and use, selected technology to achieve their goals. They prefer to “crawl, walk, then run”, as compared to the “good” companies (or the dot-com busts), who ended up running, then walking, then crawling (and finally imploding). The “great” companies always asked if and
how certain technology would fit into, and further, their hedgehog concept.
“Mediocrity is built by a fear of being left behind.” Whereas “great” companies had
“calm equanimity and quiet, deliberate steps forward – while the mediocre ones lurched about in fearful, frantic reaction.”
Chapter 8. The Flywheel & The Doom Loop From the outside, it appears that the “great” companies had some explosive moment. Yet that is because the news articles come out after a company starts to become successful. Instead, imagine a giant flywheel (a windmill). Such a flywheel doesn’t start spinning from one big push; rather, it takes a series of pushes until momentum takes over. That’s how the “great” companies broke out. What looked revolutionary from outside actually happened organically from inside.
“Nobody cares about an egg until a chicken breaks out of it.” The “great” companies had no grand names for their transformations; they actually had no awareness it was even happening. “It evolved through many agonizing arguments and fights. I am not sure that we knew exactly what we were fighting for until we looked back and said that we were fighting to establish who we were going to be.” It was “evolutionary not revolutionary.” Once the flywheel starts turning, however, people can sense the momentum and want to join, which further accelerates it turning. The “great” companies’ executives, when surveyed, were dismissive and confused about modern jargon such as “creating alignment”. When you have the right
www.kibook.club Good to Great (Page 4 of 5)
GOOD TO GREAT by Jim Collins people, you don’t need to motivate them; they are selfmotivated to be their best. When you have the right hedgehog concept, you don’t need to try to explain to employees how to align everyone to the same goal. The flailing “good” companies “frequently launched new programs with hoopla to see no sustained results.” They were “constantly changing the flywheel direction”, never allowing it to build the proper momentum. When it came to mergers and acquisitions, it always occurred after the flywheel was turning. It accelerated the flywheel instead of defining it. “Good” companies’ executives would try to sell a vision of a future, to compensate for a lack of results in the present. Whereas “great” companies would always be confronting the brutal facts of why things weren’t working, in order to improve. There was never one killer innovation (whether product or program) in the “great” companies, but rather a cumulative process of growth, “each generation building upon the work of previous generations.”
“Great” companies both shun fads AND pioneer new technology.
A student asked the author of this book: What if you just want to be personally successful, and have no interest in necessarily creating a “great” company? What if creating “good” company gets you that personal success? The author pondered for a moment, deeply considered this question from his ambitious young student, and came to the following realizations: 1. 2.
It’s “no harder to build something great than good” When the right people believe in a purpose, it’s hard to imagine not trying to make it great; it’s just a given.
“It might be statistically more rare to reach greatness but it does not require more suffering than perpetuating mediocrity.”
Chapter 9. From Good to Great to Built to Last The author’s previous book was Built to Last, and he takes the time in this final chapter to compare and contrast the two books’ concepts. Whereas the Good to Great companies had a transition period (breaking out from average stock market returns to extraordinary returns), the companies featured in Build to Last essentially took many of these principles and had applied them at their startup phase. For example, the Built to Last principle of “AND, not OR” can be seen in these Good to Great principles:
Level 5 leaders have humility AND willpower. Employees accept brutal facts AND have unwavering faith. Hedgehog concepts require deep understanding AND incredible simplicity. (Click here to purchase the book.)
www.kibook.club Good to Great (Page 5 of 5)
Overview
This book discusses why some companies have consistently beat the market over a long period of time, and what traits are common amongst such “great” companies, as compared to merely “good” companies.
Chapter 1. Good is the Enemy of Great This chapter serves as an introduction to the criteria for “Great” companies, and offers a preview of what traits will be discussed in more detail throughout the rest of the book. The companies which were considered “great” were public companies whose stock prices had been approximately equal to their industry average for many years, after which their stock took off and tripled the market for at least 15 years in a row. Of the several thousand companies surveyed, only 11 met such stringent criteria. These companies were not centered around any given “hot” industry, but rather had certain traits in common. If you were simply to look at what these companies had in common, it wouldn’t necessarily tell you very much. As an analogy, if you looked at what all Olympic athletes had in common, you could say they all had coaches. Yet you want to determine what the “great” companies had in common, that comparison “good” companies didn’t have. Essentially what’s different about the “great” companies. As such, the authors picked representative “good” companies for comparison. The authors started with no hypothesis, and just explored the data, seeing what trends emerged. These included the following traits:
The CEO’s came from within the company itself. Better corporate strategy was not a distinguishing factor in the great companies. They were not necessarily in great industries. The leaders were more down to earth like Abraham Lincoln, rather than ego-centric like Caesar. The companies focused on getting the right people first, and then working on the business.
The companies had unwavering faith, yet never discounted the “facts of reality”. The companies all found something that they could be the best in the world at; the good companies all had the “curse of competence”, being “good enough”. With good disciplined people, you have less of a need for a rigid hierarchy. There was not one defining moment of becoming great; rather, it was a buildup, a relentless pushing of a giant heavy flywheel that eventually developed its own momentum.
This book aimed to be timeless, searching for principles that would withstand the test of time. Instead of engineering a specific blueprint that was only applicable at a given time (the book was published in 2001), it searched for the physics underneath all the engineering. There will always be “new economies” in any age (e.g. electricity back in the 1800s), but the key is to define the traits of greats companies regardless of the current economic climate.
Chapter 2. Level 5 Leadership The authors identified 5 levels of leadership that the great CEO’s had. Most “good” companies had Level 4 leaders, and most “great” companies had Level 5 leaders, defined as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
“High Capable Individual” “Contributing Team Member” “Competent Manager” “Effective Leader” “Level 5 Executive”
The Level 5 Executives are described as simultaneously “modest and willful, humble and fearless.” These leaders are more like Lincoln than Caesar in terms of disposition. They have an inner drive to make everything the best it can possibly be, and yet always put the company before their own personal success. While they do have big egos, the difference is that Level 4 leaders have their egos tied up into their personal
www.kibook.club Good to Great (Page 1 of 5)
GOOD TO GREAT by Jim Collins success, while the great companies’ leaders have their egos tied up into the company’s success. They purposefully are not attempting to be big shots, and are humbler than their Level 4 compatriots. Good companies’ leaders had “gargantuan personal egos [which] contributed to demise or mediocrity of company.” Make no mistake, however; the Level 5 leaders had “ferocious resolve” and “stoic determination”, but did not necessarily show it outwardly. They were fanatically driven to produce results because they simply wanted their company to be the bestm at the expense of all else. “Good” company leaders used bad luck as an excuse when things didn’t go well, and believed it was their skill when things turned out well. By comparison, “great” company leaders attributed good luck to things going well, and worked on figuring out what they did wrong (i.e. personal accountability) when things went poorly. Some had extraordinary religious beliefs guiding their resolve, and always worked on creating something larger and more lasting than themselves.
Chapter 3. First Who … Then What In order to best adapt to a fast-changing world, you need the right group of people rather than one great idea. “Good” companies typically had a “genius with a thousand helpers” model, while “great” companies created a team of highly driven and competent employees who would all debate together on how to handle the business. The “great” companies were rigorous, not ruthless. They had less restructurings and layoffs, and cut people quickly who didn’t fit in (essentially get fired quickly, or stay for a long time). Assuming a reasonable baseline compensation, extra compensation had very little correlation to success; the right people are driven to give something their best out of a sense of personal pride.
“Managing problems makes you good, building opportunities makes you great.”
Chapter 4. Confront The Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith) “Good” companies will rest on past laurels. They will say things like “You can’t argue with 100 years of success!”, and are thus unable or unwilling to adapt to a changing world. The “great” companies, on the other hand, had what is described as a:
“A vision for greatness refined with brutal facts of reality.” Those brutal facts were faced head on. The “great” companies would fear external threats more than the “feelings of the managers”. The climate was one in which they would have extraordinary debates about the most terrifying risks. They would ask questions, and get to the core of the issues facing the business. They would have “heated scientific debates”, and would “yell and scream and then emerge with the answer.” The great companies, with the right people, would not be intimidated by competing against larger companies. They would relish in a David versus Goliath moment. They would be made stronger by adversity, excited to “not just survive, but prevail.” The chapter ends with a story about a man named Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war. He epitomized the idea of having both unwavering faith while also confronting the brutal facts. He found ways in which to inspire his fellow prisoners. For example, he recognized that nobody could withstand torture indefinitely (a brutal fact) and developed a system in which the prisoners would divulge certain information after a certain number of minutes. He developed a Morsecode-like system for communicating. When the authors asked what sort of prisoners had gotten the most dispirited, he said “the optimists.” The optimists were the ones who were always disappointing themselves by saying things like “we’ll be home by Christmas”, unwilling to confront the brutal facts. Stockdale, on the
www.kibook.club Good to Great (Page 2 of 5)
GOOD TO GREAT by Jim Collins other hand, always believed he would get home. He was just never naïvely optimistic and foolish enough to put a timeline on it. “Eventually” he would succeed despite the brutal facts; this is the mentality of all the “great” companies surveyed.
Chapter 5. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity Within the Three Circles) The fox would constantly stalk the hedgehog. The fox was wily and had many tricks up his sleeve. Yet every time he would try to attack the hedgehog, the hedgehog would ball up, put his spikes out, and defeat the fox. All the “great” companies could distill their business into one clear, simple, unifying hedgehog concept, from which all the other components of their business stemmed. “Despite the greater cunning of the fox, the hedgehog always wins.” Foxes “never integrate their thinking into one overall concept or unifying vision.” Examples of such integration are: Freud & the unconscious, Darwin & natural selection, Marx & the class struggle, or Einstein & relativity. Do not be fooled into thinking that hedgehogs are simpletons; rather, “they have piercing insight to underlying patterns of complex things.” There’s no evidence “great” companies had better strategies or were in better industries than “good” companies. Rather, they had a hedgehog concept at the intersection of three circles in a Venn diagram: 1. 2. 3.
“Just because business is good at something or makes money, doesn't mean they can be best at it.” #2 was further refined to the formula: Which "X" maximizes "profit per X"? It may seem obvious, but many of the “great” companies went through many iterations defining their “X”. Examples could be “customers”, “stores”, or even “product lines”. The “great” companies did not focus on growth; growth was a natural result of defining their hedgehog concept. Defining it took an average of 4 years to clarify, and was more of an iterative process resulting from heated debates, rather than a clearly defining moment.
The “good” companies were like foxes, and the “great” companies were like hedgehogs.
Chapter 6. A Culture of Discipline When a company starts out, it has all the enthusiasm and zeal of a young scrappy startup. But such a startup will typically “trip over their own disorganized success.” Once you bring in the professionals with MBA’s to “create order out of the startup chaos”, the entrepreneurial spirit is killed. Overly rigid bureaucratic rules are only necessary when you have the wrong people working at the company. “Great” companies made sure they had a culture of discipline, while still maintaining the spirit of creative entrepreneurship.
What you can be the best in the world at? What drives your economic engine? What you are deeply passionate about?
Note that #1 is different from “core competency”. Core competencies are what a company is already good at or already making money at. As such, it is based on the past. Rather, the “great” companies all focused on what they truly could be the best in the world at, in the future.
LOW ENTREPRENEUR SPIRIT
HIGH ENTREPRENEUR SPIRIT
HIGH DISCIPLINE
Hierarchical
“Great” Company
LOW DISCIPLINE
Bureaucratic
Scrappy Startup
You want to develop a disciplined culture using the three circles previously discussed; discipline within the
www.kibook.club Good to Great (Page 3 of 5)
GOOD TO GREAT by Jim Collins hedgehog concept. An analogy is an airline pilot: he has a highly-disciplined rigid system around him, and yet at the end of the day, in turbulent weather he has the autonomy to fly the plane as necessary. First work on getting disciplined people, then disciplined thought, and finally disciplined action, always in that order. “Great” companies had a “culture of discipline”, whereas “good” companies had a single, personally disciplining, Level 4 leader. “Good” companies typically developed bureaucratic cultures to “compensate for incompetence”, or had a “savior” CEO brought in who had sheer force of will. Neither of these create sustainable disciplined cultures.
Chapter 7. Technology Accelerators Technology bubbles always happen. For example, the dot-com boom (and subsequent bust) around the year 2000. “Great” companies used technology to further their hedgehog concept. They used it to accelerate their momentum, not create it. In “great” companies, their hedgehog concept drove the choice of technology, not the other way around. When surveyed about the top 5 most important traits of their business, technology didn’t show up in the “great” companies; rather, concepts such as “consistency”, “culture”, “philosophy”, and “work ethic” were more important. “Great” companies didn’t talk about their technology strategy as a reactionary response to a competitor; instead, they were always focused on what they were trying to create. “Good” companies, on the other hand, were driven by fear. Fear of missing out. Fear of not understanding the latest trends. Fear of “looking like a chump”. “Great” companies avoid tech fads and bandwagons. Yet they carefully consider, and use, selected technology to achieve their goals. They prefer to “crawl, walk, then run”, as compared to the “good” companies (or the dot-com busts), who ended up running, then walking, then crawling (and finally imploding). The “great” companies always asked if and
how certain technology would fit into, and further, their hedgehog concept.
“Mediocrity is built by a fear of being left behind.” Whereas “great” companies had
“calm equanimity and quiet, deliberate steps forward – while the mediocre ones lurched about in fearful, frantic reaction.”
Chapter 8. The Flywheel & The Doom Loop From the outside, it appears that the “great” companies had some explosive moment. Yet that is because the news articles come out after a company starts to become successful. Instead, imagine a giant flywheel (a windmill). Such a flywheel doesn’t start spinning from one big push; rather, it takes a series of pushes until momentum takes over. That’s how the “great” companies broke out. What looked revolutionary from outside actually happened organically from inside.
“Nobody cares about an egg until a chicken breaks out of it.” The “great” companies had no grand names for their transformations; they actually had no awareness it was even happening. “It evolved through many agonizing arguments and fights. I am not sure that we knew exactly what we were fighting for until we looked back and said that we were fighting to establish who we were going to be.” It was “evolutionary not revolutionary.” Once the flywheel starts turning, however, people can sense the momentum and want to join, which further accelerates it turning. The “great” companies’ executives, when surveyed, were dismissive and confused about modern jargon such as “creating alignment”. When you have the right
www.kibook.club Good to Great (Page 4 of 5)
GOOD TO GREAT by Jim Collins people, you don’t need to motivate them; they are selfmotivated to be their best. When you have the right hedgehog concept, you don’t need to try to explain to employees how to align everyone to the same goal. The flailing “good” companies “frequently launched new programs with hoopla to see no sustained results.” They were “constantly changing the flywheel direction”, never allowing it to build the proper momentum. When it came to mergers and acquisitions, it always occurred after the flywheel was turning. It accelerated the flywheel instead of defining it. “Good” companies’ executives would try to sell a vision of a future, to compensate for a lack of results in the present. Whereas “great” companies would always be confronting the brutal facts of why things weren’t working, in order to improve. There was never one killer innovation (whether product or program) in the “great” companies, but rather a cumulative process of growth, “each generation building upon the work of previous generations.”
“Great” companies both shun fads AND pioneer new technology.
A student asked the author of this book: What if you just want to be personally successful, and have no interest in necessarily creating a “great” company? What if creating “good” company gets you that personal success? The author pondered for a moment, deeply considered this question from his ambitious young student, and came to the following realizations: 1. 2.
It’s “no harder to build something great than good” When the right people believe in a purpose, it’s hard to imagine not trying to make it great; it’s just a given.
“It might be statistically more rare to reach greatness but it does not require more suffering than perpetuating mediocrity.”
Chapter 9. From Good to Great to Built to Last The author’s previous book was Built to Last, and he takes the time in this final chapter to compare and contrast the two books’ concepts. Whereas the Good to Great companies had a transition period (breaking out from average stock market returns to extraordinary returns), the companies featured in Build to Last essentially took many of these principles and had applied them at their startup phase. For example, the Built to Last principle of “AND, not OR” can be seen in these Good to Great principles:
Level 5 leaders have humility AND willpower. Employees accept brutal facts AND have unwavering faith. Hedgehog concepts require deep understanding AND incredible simplicity. (Click here to purchase the book.)
www.kibook.club Good to Great (Page 5 of 5)
