Good To Great

Good to Great: Book Review

This book is one of those rare finds that just makes sense. It not only reveals core principles that most companies should follow to be successful. It also relays those same principles to how individuals can be successful in their personal lives. It follows the premise on why just be good at what you do when you can be great at what you do. This is an intriguing concept due to the fact that most companies mostly concentrate one the bottom line instead of actually putting out a product or offering a service that would stand the test of time. This report will summarize on how Jim Collins (author of Good to Great) and his research team over a five-year time period, analyzed twenty-eight companies to determine the reason why some of them made the leap to greatness and why others did not.(8)

One of the major reasons why Jim Collins decided to do the research for this project is that he felt that Good was the Enemy of Great. (7) What that this term means, is that people in general just settles for good enough. The reason we do not have great companies is because we have good companies and the reason most of us do not have great lives is because we settle for good lives. Therefore, Jim and his research team set out to do research on why some companies out perform others. They wanted to figure out what separated these companies from the others. So what they did was go out and

Mitchem 2

select two sets of comparison companies. The first set of companies was the ones that exhibited great results and achieved long-term greatness. These companies are as follows: Abbott, Circuit City, Fannie Mae, Gillette, Kimberly Clark, Kroger, Nucor, Phillip Morris, Pitney Bowes, Walgreen's, and Wells Fargo.(8) The second set of companies were in the same industries with the same amount of resources and opportunities as the previously mention group but showed no signs of great results and did not exhibit long term greatness, In fact some of these companies are not even in business today. The second groups of companies are as follows: Upjohn, Silo, Great Western, Warner-Lambert, Scott Paper, A&P, Bethlehem Steel, RJ Reynolds, Addressograph, Eckerd, Bank of America, Burroughs, Chrysler, Harris, Hasbro, Rubbermaid, and Teledyne.

After researching, Jim Collins and his research team discovered that companies that jumped from Good to Great had similar management styles and philosophies. They unveiled that ten out of 11 Good to Great companies' leaders or CEOs were promoted from within. They did go outside the company to hire some hotshot executive that was going to come in and save the day. They were either people who worked for years at the company or they were members of the family that owned the company. (32) This however, was not the sole factor that separated the Good to Great companies from their competitors. Nevertheless, what these leaders did have in common was that