Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t
Where to buy Excellent to Fantastic: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t books online?
- ISBN13: 9780066620992
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
The Challenge
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how fantastic companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning.
But what about the company that is not born with fantastic DNA? How can excellent companies, mediocre companies, even terrible companies achieve enduring greatness?
The Study
For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. 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 excellent to fantastic?
The Standards
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to fantastic results and sustained persons results for at least fifteen years. How fantastic? After the leap, the excellent-to-fantastic companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the all-purpose stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite pointer of the world’s greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, All-purpose Electric, and Merck.
The Comparisons
The research team contrasted the excellent-to-fantastic companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from excellent to fantastic. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly fantastic performers while the additional set remained only excellent?
Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew learned the key determinants of greatness — why some companies make the leap and others don’t.
The Findings
The findings of the Excellent to Fantastic study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:
“Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, “glide in the face of our modern business culture and will, reasonably frankly, upset some people.”
Perhaps, but who can afford to snub these findings?
Amazon.com ReviewFive years ago, Jim Collins questioned the question, “Can a excellent company become a fantastic company and if so, how?” In Excellent to Fantastic Collins, the leader of Built to Last, concludes that it is possible, but finds there are no silver bullets. Collins and his team of researchers started their quest by sorting through a list of 1,435 companies, looking for persons that made substantial improvements in their performance over time. They finally settled on 11–including Fannie Mae, Gillette, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo–and learned common traits that challenged many of the conventional notions of corporate success. Building the transition from excellent to fantastic doesn’t require a high-profile CEO, the latest equipment, innovative change management, or even a fine-tuned business strategy. At the heart of persons rare and truly fantastic companies was a corporate culture that rigorously establish and promoted disciplined people to reflect and act in a disciplined manner. Peppered with dozens of tales and examples from the fantastic and not so fantastic, the book offers a well-reasoned road map to excellence that any organization would do well to consider. Like Built to Last, Excellent to Fantastic is one of persons books that managers and CEOs will be reading and rereading for years to come. –Harry C. Edwards
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This book has a lot of conservative religious bigotry and cult-like zeal in it. Not to mention, it is full of drama, evangelized tales : “16 years of struggle, Mockler wrinkled to the floor, struck dead by a massive heart attack”. Maybe the leader should have place yet more drama and said: a tsunami came and Mockler was carried through it in the shadow of holy spirit.
We must erect a society of tolerance and respect for all, not preach such masked despise ideologies as delivered discreetly in the book all over.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
SINCE READING THIS BOOK, I’VE WANTED TO SEND A COPY TO 3 CEO’S OF COMPANIES I RECENTLY HAD BAD EXPERIENCES. THE PROBLEM IS I (THE CUSTOMER) WOULDN’T BE ABLE TO GET THIS BOOK TO THEM! THREE BAD EXPERIENCES WITH BIG COMPANIES AND IT IS NOW SO PLAIN TO ME THAT THE LEADER OF THESE COMPANIES NEED TO READ THIS BOOK. I THINK ABOUT THIS BOOK OFTEN WHILE RUNNING MY OWN COMPANY. IF YOU ARE A BUSINESS LEADER OR BUSINESS OWNER, I STRONGLY SUGGEST THIS BOOK!
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This book would embarrass the average first grader! Its so superficial its depth has to be measured in microns. It proves that lots of idiots went to fantastic schools.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Its very simple why MOST companies don’t become fantastic. They dont want to !! Its alot cheaper to just edge out your competition (if you even have to), than to start a fee war, or any additional kind of war. Also, most companies are clueless, since they cant tell the difference between an investment, and a cost. They would rather not invest in their people because, they either might take the jobs of the one who taught them, or go somewhere else, and get paid a privileged salary, from a company that didnt have to invest in them, so then that additional company can then steal what they didnt have to invest in. Lets face it, the company with the lowest cost wins. That one statement clarifies everything else. There will never be greatness as long as this is right. The race to the botton, trumps the race to the top.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
Let me clarify…
Consulting firms have their place in the business world. These organizations abound with brainpower armed with advanced literary degrees. That’s wonderful. Most of the time, these firms do a fantastic job of providing insightful answers to problems that bedevil management. When management is too close to the trees to be able to objectively evaluate the challenges confronting them, consultants can be a huge help.
What’s the tie? This book and its companion follow-up best-seller, “Built to Last,” were written by consultants. Mr. Jim Collins, a ex- McKinsey consultant, authored this singlehandedly and, for the second, co-authored it with Mr. Porras.
“The Halo Effect” was written by a business professor named Rosenzweig.
The Halo Effect: … and the Eight Additional Business Delusions That Deceive Managers
Professor Rosenzweig held “Excellent to Fantastic” and “Built to Last” as the primary subjects of his argument about the “halo effect.”
The excellent professor points out that both tomes used hindsight to unearth the success factors that made the companies in their respective lists such standouts. The problem with that approach, Rosenzweig points out, is that hindsight–as the adage goes–is 20/20.
Take two boys who grow up in the same village. One becomes the company president while the additional never rises beyond the rank of a junior manager. From the vantage point of the villagers, could they have foreseen who was going to become what? Maybe but probably not. On the additional hand, if that question was tackled by starting from the present and then having their careers retraced back to their youth, the factors that made them into what they are can be easily learned.
That’s the fallacy inherent in basing one’s analysis on hindsight. You’ll permanently come up with the answers.
Are they the right answers? Not automatically. Assume, for example, that the president rose through the financial ranks of the company. Does the fact that he graduated with an accounting degree constitute a valid success factor? Of course not. If that accounting degree was present in the biographies of 99 additional company presidents, does that now make it a valid success factor? I still reflect not. And yet that’s how the authors of both books open their case. They used an expanded sample population and retraced the path of each company that made it to each book’s list. They then isolated the factors that appeared in every company’s path. Aha!, they said. These are the common factors that propelled these companies into our list. Now, they stated, we know what works. From that, the authors proceeded to make broad extrapolations about how the reader might use these factors to make their own companies successful.
I did what the professor did. I checked the standing of most of the companies in this first book. I came up with a review of mixed results. Using the same measure that the book used, some companies were doing well, most had become average, and a few were lagging.
An even simpler way to check the validity of these so-called success factors is to compare the list in both books. Surely a company that had transitioned from excellent to fantastic would stay fantastic enough to ensure that it was built to last. Right?
Incorrect.
I have to agree with the professor. There is no success formula embodied in the advice proffered by the book. Persons nuggets of advice are misleading. The advice is misleading because their source–the research results–are flawed. The research results are flawed because the research assumption is flawed. What is that assumption? It differs slightly for these two books but it could be roughly stated as such: “Isolate the common factors behind the success of these companies–the ones that made it to our list. Extrapolate the lessons from persons few common factors and write a best-seller.” Or two.
And that’s exactly what he/they did!
I’ve read both books and I’m certain the reader will learn new things from each one. But, after reading “The Halo Effect” (and agreeing with it), I know now that neither “Excellent to Fantastic” nor “Built to Last” reveal any excellent, fantastic, or everlasting secrets of business success.
Addendum:
Jim Collins is an alumnus of the prestigious consulting firm, McKinsey & Co. The firm publishes The McKinsey Quarterly, a newsletter akin to the Harvard Business Review. The first issue of the 2007 newsletter (2007 number 1) contains an adaptation of the book, “The Halo Effect.” The article (mercifully) omits mentioning either of these two books, maybe because its leader was one of their own.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5