Jim Collins is a student and teacher of enduring great companies -- how they grow, how they attain superior performance,
and how good companies can become great companies. Having invested over a decade of research into the topic, Jim
has co-authored three books, including the classic Built to Last, a fixture on the Business Week bestseller list
for more than five years, generating over 70 printings and translations into 16 languages. His work has been featured
in Fortune, The Economist, Business Week, USA Today, Industry Week, Inc., Harvard Business Review and Fast Company.
Driven by a relentless curiosity, Jim began his research and teaching career on the faculty at Stanford Graduate
School of Business, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992. In 1995, he founded a management
laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, where he now conducts multi-year research projects and works with executives from
the private, public, and social sectors.
Jim has served as a teacher to senior executives and CEOs at corporations that include: Starbucks Coffee, Merck,
Patagonia, American General, W.L. Gore, and hundreds more. He has also worked with the non-corporate sector such
as the Leadership Network of Churches, Johns Hopkins Medical School, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and
The Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Non-Profit Management.
Jim invests a significant portion of his energy in large-scale research projects -- often five or more years in
duration -- to develop fundamental insights and then translate those findings into books, articles and lectures.
He uses his management laboratory to work directly with executives and to develop practical tools for applying
the concepts that flow from his research.
In addition, Jim is an avid rock climber and has made free ascents of the West Face of El Capitan and the East
Face of Washington Column in Yosemite Valley.
Review
"One of the top ten business books of 2001"
--Business Week
Submitted by the Publisher, March, 2002
Summary
The Challenge
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and
how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning.
But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad
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 good to great?
The Standards
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to
great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great
companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in
fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies,
including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.
The Comparisons
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies
that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly
great performers while the other set remained only good?
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 discovered the key determinants of
greatness why some companies make the leap and others don't.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Good Is the Enemy of Great
p. 1
Level 5 Leadership
p. 17
First Who...Then What
p. 41
Confront the Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith)
p. 65
The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles)
p. 90
A Culture of Discipline
p. 120
Technology Accelerators
p. 144
The Flywheel and the Doom Loop
p. 164
From Good to Great to Built to Last
p. 188
Epilogue: Frequently Asked Questions
p. 211
Research Appendices
p. 219
Notes
p. 261
Index
p. 287
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.