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A review by lassarina
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't by Jim Collins
5.0
My boss had asked me to read this book for work purposes, and overall I found it very useful. It's interesting to read it in 2017, when the comparison companies were household names to me as a child (I was born in 1982.) The book has a very simple, clear thesis and while the core of the argument can be distilled down to just a few words, the majority of the book is the supporting examples. These are told in a readable way, such that even someone without a strong background in business can easily follow. I wasn't familiar with the details of any of the industries in which these companies operate (when I was corporate, I was on the benefits side of things, and I've spent the last 8 years in the public sector), but that wasn't necessary knowledge to understand the examples or the core argument.
The book's thesis boils down to the idea that discipline is the core of all greatness. It uses a Venn diagram called the "three circles" to identify a sweet spot where a company can focus to become truly great. The three circles are passion (what is the company, as an organization, passionate about), proficiency (what can it be the best in the world at—not what it's best at now, but what it can be), and profit (selecting a metric to measure proft - for example, dollars per ton of finished steel.) At the center of those three circles is a company's "hedgehog concept" - the one thing it can do better than any other organization.
I don't work for a for-profit company, and I really have no intention of ever doing so again, but I think that the basic concepts in this book are broadly applicable to any organization. Indeed, they're broadly applicable to life. Find what you're great at, what you're passionate about, and what supports you. Then approach those things in a disciplined manner. The thread of discipline is a constant one in this book—the idea that the great companies being used as examples did not skitter about grabbing at every shiny opportunity, but rather took only those opportunities that fit with their core concepts and improved upon that. There is a strong tendency in business to go "ooh! Shiny!" and grab at something simply because it's there, and this book shows how companies that resisted that tendency did better than their competitors who did not, overall.
There are a couple of big takeaways from this book that I think are really important: one is the concept of a leader who wants greatness for the sake of the company even after that leader is gone, not for the leader's personal glory. You can tell when the person above you is in it to make himself or herself look good; that is not a good person to work for. But when the person above you wants things to be well done because that's the correct thing to do, it's inspiring, and it brings bigger effort. The other is the flywheel concept - none of these companies exploded into perfection overnight. The book is very clear that discipline, not luck, is how one gets to greatness. There is no magic bullet, just hard and consistent work. (A valuable lesson in an age of instant gratification, and I'm honest enough to admit that I want the instant gratification, but I understand the value of the work.)
There is a supplementary monograph, Good to Great and the Social Sectors, which goes into some more detail about how the core concepts apply in a non-profit area, which I loved and found incredibly useful. Almost all of the main book applies, with the exception of the third circle, profit. That has to be adjusted to the mission of the social-oriented organization.
Overall, I think the thing I liked best about this book was that it was not a book about how to wring maximum profit out of one's employees while tricking them into thinking they're doing a good thing; it was very, very clear that treating employees well and getting people on board who care about the company is an incredibly valuable, even necessary, aspect of becoming great. I think about how my parents were treated by the companies they worked for and how that shaped their lives (and mine), and how I feel about the place where I work now, and I have to agree. (But I've never been interested in profit for its own sake.) This concept is beautifully distilled in the introduction to the monograph: "If we have only great companies, we will merely have a prosperous society, not a great one. Economic growth and power are the means, not the definition, of a great nation." This concept threads through both the monograph and the main book, and I think that's what makes it so appealing to me.
The book's thesis boils down to the idea that discipline is the core of all greatness. It uses a Venn diagram called the "three circles" to identify a sweet spot where a company can focus to become truly great. The three circles are passion (what is the company, as an organization, passionate about), proficiency (what can it be the best in the world at—not what it's best at now, but what it can be), and profit (selecting a metric to measure proft - for example, dollars per ton of finished steel.) At the center of those three circles is a company's "hedgehog concept" - the one thing it can do better than any other organization.
I don't work for a for-profit company, and I really have no intention of ever doing so again, but I think that the basic concepts in this book are broadly applicable to any organization. Indeed, they're broadly applicable to life. Find what you're great at, what you're passionate about, and what supports you. Then approach those things in a disciplined manner. The thread of discipline is a constant one in this book—the idea that the great companies being used as examples did not skitter about grabbing at every shiny opportunity, but rather took only those opportunities that fit with their core concepts and improved upon that. There is a strong tendency in business to go "ooh! Shiny!" and grab at something simply because it's there, and this book shows how companies that resisted that tendency did better than their competitors who did not, overall.
There are a couple of big takeaways from this book that I think are really important: one is the concept of a leader who wants greatness for the sake of the company even after that leader is gone, not for the leader's personal glory. You can tell when the person above you is in it to make himself or herself look good; that is not a good person to work for. But when the person above you wants things to be well done because that's the correct thing to do, it's inspiring, and it brings bigger effort. The other is the flywheel concept - none of these companies exploded into perfection overnight. The book is very clear that discipline, not luck, is how one gets to greatness. There is no magic bullet, just hard and consistent work. (A valuable lesson in an age of instant gratification, and I'm honest enough to admit that I want the instant gratification, but I understand the value of the work.)
There is a supplementary monograph, Good to Great and the Social Sectors, which goes into some more detail about how the core concepts apply in a non-profit area, which I loved and found incredibly useful. Almost all of the main book applies, with the exception of the third circle, profit. That has to be adjusted to the mission of the social-oriented organization.
Overall, I think the thing I liked best about this book was that it was not a book about how to wring maximum profit out of one's employees while tricking them into thinking they're doing a good thing; it was very, very clear that treating employees well and getting people on board who care about the company is an incredibly valuable, even necessary, aspect of becoming great. I think about how my parents were treated by the companies they worked for and how that shaped their lives (and mine), and how I feel about the place where I work now, and I have to agree. (But I've never been interested in profit for its own sake.) This concept is beautifully distilled in the introduction to the monograph: "If we have only great companies, we will merely have a prosperous society, not a great one. Economic growth and power are the means, not the definition, of a great nation." This concept threads through both the monograph and the main book, and I think that's what makes it so appealing to me.