Book Review: Good to Great by Jim Collins

I just finished Good to Great by Jim Collings and his research team and am once again impressed. I really liked Built to Last and this one is a worthy follow up or pre-quel as Collins likes to put it.

The book evolves around the idea that with Built to Last, all the companies in question were great companies from the start. Greatness was a gift they were given at birth by their founders. But what about good companies that would like to become great? This is exactly where this book comes in, looking at average companies over 15 years that later excelled for another 15, beating the stock market more than 3.5 times in those second 15 years. In the end, all they found were eleven companies to look at and compared them to companies (from similar industries) without the sudden move to greatness.

The concepts brought forward in the book are wonderful and well explained. Some of the them seem logical while others make you wonder how that concept can make such a profound difference or even how it can work at all. The book will eventually tell you how it works and if you agree with it or not, you will believe that it worked in these companies and might do so in others too.

In general, this is a book for people who are into management or business, but the stories told might be interesting for a lot more people. Go to your local book shop and read a few pages, maybe you like the way it is written. I myself was well entertained and had a very good read which tought me a great deal about how companies behave, react and grow.