Good to Great
Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t
Jim Collins
“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?”
I feel like I’ve read this book before, but apparently I never reviewed it, so I read it again anyway. Good to Great is one of those business books that gets recommended constantly, and I can see why. It jumps straight into the content with very little fluff or unnecessary introduction, which I really liked. It doesn’t beat around the bush and gets into the ideas quickly. That said, I had mixed feelings about it overall.
One thing I struggled with was the company examples. Out of the 11 companies featured, I hadn’t heard of most of them or didn’t really know much about them. I assume that’s partly because they are American companies and many were probably huge in their time, but it still made parts of the book harder to connect with. To be fair, there’s probably not much the author could do about that if those were genuinely the top performing companies used in the research.
The book definitely has some good ideas and concepts throughout, and there were moments where I highlighted interesting points. But overall, a lot of it felt too generalist and abstract. Every company is unique, and at times the advice felt a bit too broad, almost like it avoided putting the dot on any “i”.
I also found the structure a little jumpy in places. The ideas were interesting, but sometimes it felt like the book moved around too much without going deeply enough into practical application.
Overall, not bad, but also not great. There are some valuable insights in it, especially if you enjoy leadership and business strategy books, but I personally found it a bit overrated compared to the hype around it. Overall 3 stars.
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