Good To Great Summary

The goal of Good to Great by Jim Collins is to find the traits of great companies, through an extensive data collection project. Collins and his team tracked 28 companies from a variety of industries to find common traits that separated the “great” companies from the “good” companies. His team identifies six characteristics that separate good companies from great companies. Of these six, I personally found “First Who… Then What, the Hedgehog Concept, and the Culture of Discipline” the most interesting characteristics of the book. These three are absolutely critical to the continued success of an enterprise. Along with these three, the other characteristics of great companies identified by Collins relate to Enterprise Engineering, because each characteristic relates to the strategy and leadership of an enterprise. One of the main strengths of the book is this identification; that ultimately companies become great through sound strategy and effective leadership.
This was the most comprehensive analysis of business performance to date. The main finding from Collins is that business success is a flywheel, a lot of little actions help get the flywheel started, and then the flywheel is able to propel itself. The six main characteristics of successful companies help the flywheel to spin as fast as possible. Each of these relates to either strategy or management, which is critical for a budding enterprise. However, there are still questions about how good these characteristics are at sustaining greatness. Out of the 11 “great” companies identified by Collins, only one is still overperforming today. Thus, it is likely that Collins “looking at the past” analysis identified trends that were truly random noise. However, Collins work gives fundamental principles that will be necessary for the evolution of any business from good to great, which is the overall goal of the