Good to Great CD: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't | 
 enlarge | Creator: Jim Collins
Publisher: HarperAudio
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $11.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  693 reviews
Sales Rank: 41325
Format: Abridged, Audiobook
Media: Audio CD
Edition: Abridged
Number Of Items: 5
Pages: 6
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 5.7 x 5.1 x 0.7
ISBN: 0694526088
Dewey Decimal Number: 658
EAN: 9780694526086
ASIN: 0694526088
Publication Date: October 1, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com's Best of 2001
Five years ago, Jim Collins asked the question, "Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?" In Good to Great Collins, the author of Built to Last, concludes that it is possible, but finds there are no silver bullets. Collins and his team of researchers began their quest by sorting through a list of 1,435 companies, looking for those that made substantial improvements in their performance over time. They finally settled on 11--including Fannie Mae, Gillette, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo--and discovered common traits that challenged many of the conventional notions of corporate success. Making the transition from good to great doesn't require a high-profile CEO, the latest technology, innovative change management, or even a fine-tuned business strategy. At the heart of those rare and truly great companies was a corporate culture that rigorously found and promoted disciplined people to think and act in a disciplined manner. Peppered with dozens of stories and examples from the great and not so great, the book offers a well-reasoned road map to excellence that any organization would do well to consider. Like Built to Last, Good to Great is one of those books that managers and CEOs will be reading and rereading for years to come. --Harry C. Edwards
Product Description
Destined to be the business publishing event of the year, or even the decade, this is the long awaited new book by the co–author of Built To Last. In it, Jim Collins shares his latest long–term research – and shows how even mediocre companies can become long–term world beaters. Jim Collins has become a best–selling classic business author, with 590,000 copies sold to date, and has been translated into 17 languages.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 688 more reviews...
 It was Great August 19, 2008
The book arrived much sooner than expected and in great shape. Very pleased with the service and product.
Challenge to be Passionate August 14, 2008
Working in Church leadership, I found Mr. Miller and team's work challenging and appealing. What seems obvious in being great is actually the antithesis of 'conistent greatness'. I would recommend this book for any organization. A+ for those of us in ministry!
Good to Great experience August 14, 2008
I had never purchased anything at Amazon .com The book I bought was in pristine condition and it was delivered promptly. I will continue to buy items from this website . thanks
 Neither Good Nor Great July 30, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book by Jim Collins is one of the most successful books to be found in the "Business" section of your local megabookstore, and given how it purports to tell you how to take a merely good company and make it great, it's not difficult to see why that might be so. Collins and his crack team of researchers say they swam through stacks of business literature in search of info on how to pull this feat off, and came up with a list of great companies that illustrate some concepts central to the puzzle. They also present for each great company what they call a "comparison company," which is kind of that company with a goatee and a much less impressive earnings record. The balance of the book is spent expanding on pithy catch phrases that describe the great companies, like "First Who, Then What" or "Be a Hedgehog" or "Grasp the Flywheel, not the Doom Loop." No, no, I'm totally serious.
I've got several problems with this book, the biggest of which stem from fundamentally viewpoints on how to do research. Collin's brand of research is not my kind. It's not systematic, it's not replicable, it's not generalizable, it's not systematic, it's not free of bias, it's not model driven, and it's not collaborative. It's not, in short, scientific in any way. That's not to say that other methods of inquiry are without merit --the Harvard Business Review makes pretty darn good use of case studies, for example-- but way too often Collins's great truths seemed like square pegs crammed into round holes, because a round hole is what he wants. For example, there's no reported search for information that disconfirms his hypotheses. Are there other companies that don't make use of a Culture of Discipline (Chapter 6, natch) but yet are still great according to Collins's definition? Are there great companies that fail to do some of the things he says should make them great? The way that the book focuses strictly on pairs of great/comparison companies smacks of confirmatory information bias, which is a kink in the human mind that drives us to seek out and pay attention to information that confirms our pre-existing suppositions and ignore information that fails to support them.
Relatedly, a lot of the book's themes and platitudes strike me as owing their popularity to the same factors that make the horoscope or certain personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator so popular: they're so general and loosely defined that almost anyone can look at that and not only say that wow, that make sense, and I've always felt the same way! This guy and me? We're geniuses! The chapter about "getting the right people on the bus" that extols the virtue of hiring really super people is perhaps the most obvious example. Really, did anyone read this part and think "Oh, man. I've been hiring half retarded chimps. THAT'S my problem! I should hire GOOD people!" Probably not, and given that Collins doesn't go into any detail about HOW to do this or any of his other good to great pro tips, I'm not really sure where the value is supposed to be.
It also irked me that Good to Great seems to try and exist in a vacuum, failing to relate its findings to any other body of research except Collins's other book, Built to Last. The most egregious example of this is early on in Chapter 2 where Collins talks about his concept of "Level 5 Leadership," which characterizes those very special folks who perch atop a supposed leadership hierarchy. The author actually goes into some detail describing Level 5 leaders, but toward the end of the chapter he just shrugs his figurative shoulders and says "But we don't know how people get to be better leaders. Some people just are." Wait, what? People in fields like Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Organizational Development have been studying, scientifically, what great leaders do and how to do it for decades. We know TONS about how to become a better leader. There are entire industries built around it. You would think that somebody on the Good to Great research team may have done a cursory Google search on this.
So while Good to Great does have some interesting thoughts and a handful of amusing or even fascinating stories to tell about the companies it profiles (I liked, for example, learning about why Walgreens opens so many shops in the same area, even to the point of having stores across the street from each other in some cities), ultimately it strikes me as vague generalities and little to no practical information about how to actually DO anything to make your company great.
Excellent Book July 28, 2008
Great book on leadership and promotes excellent ideas for company success. Easy read and very useful. The points presented make perfect sense and are very practical. Not a good book but a great book!
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