Good To Great
October 27th, 2006 by Duff OMelia
I found this book by Jim Collins to be quite interesting. He and his team of researchers spent about 5 years working on it. They found only 11 companies that met their strict definition of a great company. The company had to be publicly traded, had to have at least 15 years of average to sub-average performance followed by at least 15 years of outstanding performance. So the company had to blow the doors off their industry and the market in general during the latter 15 years (demonstrating returns at least 3 times greater than the market). Only 11 companies met this criteria.
Then they compared those 11 companies to other companies in their industries that didn’t do as well. They also found a ton of common attributes among the great companies. It was fascinating.
I was surprised that the CEO’s of the 11 companies aren’t rock stars. They’re not household names that everyone knows. In fact, they’re relatively unknown. The book had a number of other surprises as well.
I enjoyed this book.
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