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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Good to Great summary
Jim Collins
Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't
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4.4 (573 ratings)
15 mins
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What is Good to Great about?
Good to Great (2001) presents the findings of a five-year study by the author and his research team. The team identified public companies that had achieved enduring success after years of mediocre performance and isolated the factors which differentiated those companies from their lackluster competitors.
These factors have been distilled into key concepts regarding leadership, culture and strategic management.
About the Author
Jim Collins is an author, lecturer and consultant, who among other things, has taught at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and is a frequent contributor to Fortune, BusinessWeek and Harvard Business Review. His previous book Built to Last sold over 4 million copies.
The author was inspired to write Good to Great when a business acquaintance pointed out that his previous book examined only how great companies stay great, not how they can become that way in the first place.
Table of Contents
Key idea 1 of 9
Good-to-great companies can teach others how to make the same leap.
Jim Collins’s previous best seller Built to Last explains how great companies sustain high performance and stay great. Most companies, however, are not great. Hence the more burning question: How do companies go from good to great? What do they do differently from their competitors who stay mediocre at best?
To answer these questions, Jim Collins and his research team studied three groups of public US companies in a five-year project:
Good-to-great companies, which had been performing at or below the average stock market performance for 15 years, before making a transition to “greatness,” in other words generating cumulative returns of at least three times the general stock market over the next 15 years.
Direct comparison companies, which remained mediocre or dwindled although they had roughly the same possibilities as the good-to-great companies during the time of transition.
Unsustained comparison companies, which made a short-lived transition from good-to-great, but slid back to performing at a level substantially below the stock market average after their rise.
Over the course of their research, Collins and his team examined over 6,000 press articles and 2,000 pages of executive interviews. The goal was to discover what the good-to-great companies had done differently, and thus help other companies make the same leap.
Good-to-great companies can teach others how to make the same leap.
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Who should read Good to Great
- Executives, investors and managers interested in taking their company from mediocrity to greatness
- Entrepreneurs who want to make their start-up great from the very beginning
- Anyone interested in what makes for great leadership, great corporate culture and great strategic planning
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