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Good to Great, Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don't (精装)
by Jim Collins
| Category:
Management, Leadership, Business, Corporate excellence |
| Market price: ¥ 280.00
MSL price:
¥ 238.00
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In Stock |
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MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
A profound and powerful book that is destined to be a timeless management classic. One of the Top Ten business reads recommended by MSL. |
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AllReviews |
  1 2 Total 2 pages 15 items |
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Alan Ertle, USA
<2006-12-19 00:00>
Well, I always thought that Good to Great was too good to be true. The author and his team picked several firms that exploded in the late 1980s compared with some selected 'matched' firms that did not do well and tried to identify a set of criteria that they could identify to attribute cause to the effect (success). The problem is that with such retrospective analysis (this would be called a case-control study in clinical research) you can only identify differences and can never attribute cause and effect. These types of studies are inherently poorly resistant to biases inserted by the authors. Typically, they have a preconceived notion of what they are looking for and then go find it in a self-fulfilling prophesy. This book is no different. The data is from public and published information like SEC reports, other published info, and interviews. The data is pretty subjective.
I was wondering what happened to some of the "great" companies compared to the ones that were not great in the same industry (in clinical research, you would always pick two to four comparison cases, rather than just one, to prevent bias, or to help prevent it). The reason to look was based on my glance at chart on page 2 where it was clear that the "great" companies were beginning to level off. Now we all know that there was a huge stock boom in the mid- to late- 1990s and that emotion and luck played as much a part in many success stories and were short lived. The book was published in 2001. What happened to those companies?
So here is what I found (the first company is the "great" one):
Walgreen traded at ~$40 in 2001 and about ~$46 now. Eckerd was purchased by J.C. Penny in 1999 while they were researching the book. Seems to be a crappy comparison.
Abbott traded at ~$46 in 2001 and about ~$42 now. Pharmacia was purchased by Pfizer in 2000 while the book was being written. Seems to be a crappy comparison.
Circuit City traded at ~$9 in 2001 and about ~$18 now. Silo went bankrupt in 1995. Seems to be a crappy comparison.
Kimberly-Clark traded at ~$65 in 2001 and about ~$60 now. Kimberly-Clark bought Scott Paper in 1995. Seems to be a crappy comparison.
Gillette traded at ~$34 in 2001 and about ~$55 now. Pfizer purchased Warner-Lambert in 2000 as the book was being written. Seems to be a crappy comparison.
Wells Fargo traded at ~$44 in 2001 and about ~$62 now. Bank of America traded at ~$20 in 2001 and about ~$45 now.
Kroger traded at ~$24 in 2001 and about ~$19 now. A & P (Great A & P Tea) traded at ~$7 in 2001 and about ~$28 now.
Thus, it seems that the attribution of cause and effect to the differences they found was a completely flawed methodology and probably has more complex solutions and reasons. It also shows that the authors had tremendous selection bias and compared the "great" firms with primarily those firms know to be doomed. Not a fair comparison. The ones that didn't cease to exist seem to be doing as well to day as their "great" comparisons.
Additionally, most of the concepts are recycled. Not bad ideas, but recycled with different jargon attributed to older ideas. The idea that leaders and managers should focus on what the firm and they do best, what they are passionate about, and what they can achieve rather than what they want to achieve is a great idea, but not new and it sure didn't need to be called the hedgehog concept. (A negative review. MSL remarks.)
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Gerardo, USA
<2006-12-19 00:00>
From Good to Great was recommended to me by my talented CEO. He said to me one time 'I want to do this with our company, I know it is doable, and we are going to do it'. So I took on reading it, a bit skeptically, and it taught to me that success is, as T. A. Edison put it, 10% luck and personal talent and 90% hard work. The interesting thing is that when the 90% of work is done in the proper way, success arises. Collins' book studies the patterns found in the management of many good companies a few of which became great companies. There is over and over again the 'David VS Goliath' story of two companies, one had it all and the other had very little, and how the result of poor management of the Goliath companies led them into extinction, and how the little David companies, by a combination of good management, right team, and a strong corporate honesty, integrity and discipline were led to total success against all odds.
Collins goes on to say that success does not come from working 100 hour weeks, rather from working 40 hours weeks with all the efforts put in the right direction, with all the right people doing exactly what they were hired to do. It sounds very good, and I feel so lucky to be working in a company which is willing to put this theory into practice.
The book is well written and each chapter can be read separately. I actually read it on three consecutive Sundays while laying down in front of the Pacific Ocean, and enjoyed it from cover to cover.
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A European reader, Europe
<2006-12-19 00:00>
One of the best findings of this book for me was that those great enterprises do not tend to invest vast sums in "motivation programs" to keep their employees on board. What they have applied is either take it or leave it philosophy - you either WANT the job badly and you love your company because it's great and your company loves you because your bring tangible results or you DON'T WANT it and you're out. We have implemented several motivation schemes in our company recently, with a package of social benefits still to come. However I am in doubt if this will make those who have grumbled so far stay and motivate them to become overachievers... We have therefore decided that except for what has already been agreed no other motivation schemes will be applied and that our efforts now will focus on making people love their jobs and work best to their abilities. Sounds idealistic but seemingly the best choice. |
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Susanne Bowen, USA
<2006-12-19 00:00>
I read several business books. Comparing/contrasting the last few with this one... Freakonomics gave me a new way to analyze events and situations. Even the most unbelievable offered "cause" for an event should be considered. Look at the whole picture. The World is Flat was exciting, but our company is doing everything in it, has been since 1998... the whole time, quite often, others thinking we were weird. They didn't understand. They still don't. I think often in America, we want to think that the world revolves around us and that the world is far away. It's like God bless America. How about, may God bless the world, while you're at it. Now, Good to Great... of all 3 books, this one hit home to me and my company. Some of at the top tend to want to micro-manage and be the "icon". Read this book and discover... that it makes total sense that micro-managers who want to be the HERO, the ICON... their companies won't succeed for long. Their "staff" who wishes it was his team that he was a part of... will leave for jobs where they can be on a team of creative thinking/hard/smart working people with a "boss" to match. I love this book. It made me analyze myself for improvement. I have the audio and print version, will listen to it over and over. |
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Larry Baxer, USA
<2006-12-19 00:00>
Several reviewers have outlined the essential features of this book and there is no need to repeat that here. The great strength of the book is an apparent discipline to develop objective data and draw generalized conclusions. However, I wonder if the underlying criteria are flawed for identifying great companies. The basic idea is to identify companies that were generally average for a sustained (15 year period) and become well above average (3 x industry standard in stock price) for a sustained period (again, 15 years). However, as the book points out, those in the company did not notice the shift. In many cases, it seems to correlate with having been noticed by the press - creating a buzz that boosts stock values without any fundamental change in business productivity. While it would be hard to sustain this for 15 years if a company was a flash in the pan, it is quite imaginable that a recently discovered, well run company could sustain this without having any particularly distinguishing characteristics relative to other well run companies except for recently appearing on the popular press radar screen.
Aside from this criticism and no effort to identify poor or average companies with the same characteristics as the great companies, the methodology seems very sound and the work conscientious.
The book is an excellent read and much more substantial than the commonly touted endless and commonly superficial lists of things to do and not to do to succeed in business. I highly recommend it.
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