Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

Quyển Từ Tốt Đến Vĩ Đại của Jim Collins là một quyển sách xuất sắc.
Đây là một cuốn sách hay và thực sự lôi cuốn. Tác phẩm không phải được viết dựa trên những kinh nghiệm của tác giả, mà đó là cả một quá trình nghiên cứu, đúc kết của cả một nhóm. Các kết luận được đưa ra trên cơ sở phân tích, nghiên cứu kỹ lưỡng, do đó tính thực tiễn khi áp dụng các kết luận này khá cao. 
Quả thật đây là một cuốn sách không thể thiếu cho dân kinh doanh.
Đọc tác phẩm bạn sẽ được mở mang và tiếp xúc với nhiều quan điểm, khái niệm mới. Trăn trở với câu hỏi lớn “Làm thế nào những công ty tốt, công ty bình thường, hay ngay cả công ty đang trong tình trạng tồi tệ cũng có thể đạt đến mức vĩ đại trường tồn?” Jim Collins đã trình bày vô cùng logic và rõ ràng trong 9 chương sách.
Những điểm quan trọng nhất mà sách nhấn mạnh đó là: ý tưởng, chiến lược, kỷ luật, công nghệ và cuối cùng là cách xây dựng nền tảng để nhảy vọt. Mỗi kết luận này đều mang những ý nghĩa to lớn và hữu ích, với giá trị lớn cùng những triết lí rất hay đôi khi làm mình còn thấy ngạc nhiên và sửng sốt.

Simple, yet very striking message that has resonated with me perfectly.
Author (& the well-organised, scientific approach to back up his thesis) confirms what my experience tells me - that transformation of good to great is enabled by simple truths we keep neglecting on the daily basis because we need some stuff "right here & right now", e.g.:

* building up team in a steady way, with PROPER people, not just available people
* strategic goals are important for everyone, you just sometimes need to state them in a different way for different people - but having unique specialty/target/focus(/thing your company excels in) aka hedgehog concept is crucial to distinguish from mediocrity
* iterative, tiny (but consistent) steps - not the quasi-random "leapfrogging" - is what builds up success long-term
* culture of discipline - I couldn't emphasise it too much - some sort of discipline & duty HAS to be within people, not in policies or control mechanisms (which lead only to US vs THEM syndrome)
* high standards (by example) from the top to the ground

17 years have passed since this book has go published, but it didn't get outdated at all - highly recommended classic.

Jim Collins uses a systematic approach to look in depth into these companies and see what really makes them great. With that said, there are a couple companies that should either be reevaluated or may have not “keep up with the times”. Case in point, Circuit City & Fannie Mae. Though business is volatile and anything can happen but with as much analysis as his team should have done, there should have been some sort of “take away” from this. The book has many one liners that make remembering key points easier. Using his criteria for the “good to great selection process” makes his data and analysis much more substantial then someone just spouting what they “feel” makes a great company.

This is still, from my point of view, a great book to read as there are many things that are very useful. Greatness takes time to mold and create and doesn’t happen over night. What I took as some of the best advice, “…every good-to-great transformation followed the same basic pattern – accumulating momentum, turn by turn of the flywheel – until buildup transformed into breakthrough.” The book is filled with many motivational and good forms of advice to follow which can in fact help drive a good company to greatness. All in all, I recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn the art of driving growth in a business and read about the same from a historical analysis of great companies.

OK, so I'm making my way through this book... painfully, slowly, pyromaniacly.... and, I do have to say it is FANTASTIC if you find yourself surrounded by people without common sense. Of course, I don't have a business degree... oh, wait, I'm not supposed to have common sense.

Anyways, now that I've trailed off into ADD tangents, my boss gave me this book to read and I do like the principles. I have one thing to say: way better than the teaching books I used to have to read. GEESH!

Why Indie Authors Should Read Business Books

I am finally pursuing my lifelong passion of becoming an author, and writing is a business, so I needed to invest in myself. I figured "the bible" of the business world would have some interesting things to say. After all, a business of one is still a business and who wouldn't enjoy the leap from mediocrity to longevity? The book made it clear that building a great business isn't just about a great leader who exits the company, only to have it fall apart. What makes a great business, and leader of the business, is someone who is able to build something that will last long after their lifetime.

That should resonate with authors. I don't know any authors that want their books to disappear without their presence? We have the benefit of creating products that at the very least will never go out of style. Innovations may change the way we read but they will never eliminate books altogether. What we write will last and it's our responsibility to build something from it so people actually give a damn about our work long after we are gone.

The lessons in this book teach a person how to develop a strategy, how to build a team, the importance of being disciplined, and the importance of managing expectations.

The Hedgehog Concept is something creatives should be able to maneuver to their advantage. It's all about finding what you can be best at, passionate about, and quantifying how to measure your success. For an author maybe that's finding a niche and having the discipline to stick with it rather than chasing the latest genre fad.

For building a team, again think about how many people it takes to make a book. You don't just write a draft and publish it on KDP. If you do, and are successful than I am jealous but most of us can't write perfection the first go around. You need beta readers to give you general feedback on what's working and what's not; you need an editor (or two) to make sure it's readable; you need a top-notch book cover (some authors can make their own, some need to add a graphic designer to their team) and finally you need to build your audience, because they're the most important part of the team.

Though there are a lot of lessons in this book the final thing I'm gonna touch on is the Stockdale Paradox. It's all about managing expectations. You can truly believe you are going to find success, while also managing that expectation. Stockdale was a POW in Vietnam who knew he would return home but kept his sanity because he knew it would be a while, while other soldiers in the camp were overly optimistic, thought they would get home by Christmas, only to be heartbroken when their expectations failed.

Pursuing a creative endeavor is still a business, and today it's never been easier for someone to enter that business It's my educated guess that it's in order for creatives to educate themselves on traditional business practices if they hope to sustain long-term growth and success in their field.

Besides the two most important reminders that this book brought along, the concept of 'level 5 leadership' and the importance of selecting the right people for the job and despite half of the book describing the methodology of their study, the books has a higher ration of trite, if common sense, ideas than strong arguments that can predict success.

The first thing to remember is that excellent leadership is not only about being a servant leader—it's also mandatory that you are a rigorous, ambitious person that relentlessly follows a vision of excellence. Even so, this seems to me easier to do than being a truly humble leader as you accumulate success and power. And here the book is thin on explanations. I wish it had touched more on how humility is neither about being weak, meek, or indecisive, nor even about shunning publicity. Humility is about a true lack of narcissism—knowing what you don't know (the overwhelming amount of dark matter out there), not underestimating your competition, listening to weird ideas, being passionately curious, and valuing substance to fluff.

Secondly, it is paramount to have the right people on the bus even before knowing the direction. This sounds very common sense, again, but in a world obsessed with fast growth it might also be the first thing to cut on. I'm a strong believer in the hiring principles of continuing to look when in doubt (but making sure you've looked thoroughly) and in being swift in making people changes when a certain formation goes against the vision and the strategy you've all agreed to pursue. Lastly, James Collins makes an interesting point about giving best people the best opportunities rather than the best problems to solve. I've seen many very talented people being crushed because they were given the responsibility of steering a sinking boat.

Overall, James Collins is not the first one to explain that grit, passion, huge amounts of work and discipline, focus, and putting understanding in front of bravado are what builds great performers, both in the individual and in the corporate spheres. In particular, the Hedgehog Concept, for which the book is usually referenced, is argued incredibly weakly but it should give managers the guideline that it's not really worth giving your best performers mandates they aren't passionate about, and this is me turning the concept onto its head towards individual performance, for the book looks at it in a corporate, macro sense.

I also share the sentiment that it is mostly backwards looking (after all, most of the "great" companies are not great companies anymore) and therefore it doesn't really make predictions and it is more about correlation than causation.

As well, while researching the criticism about this book, I've stumbled upon a nice piece in HBR which was proposing that some of these great companies should look at becoming good after all—that is to say coming back from great, which solely means exceptionally profitable, like Pepsi, who are not in the book, or Philips Morris, who are in the book, to working for the greater good.

The author insisted that the book is based on cold, objective, ruthless research. But it consists of nothing but a set of hindsight biased / cherrypicked inspirational stories. It offers the same advice you find fucking everywhere: put soul in your work, work a lot, be kind, focus on people, do one thing and do it well, etc. Well, many comparison companies did these as well... but they were less lucky with their hires and their strategic bets.

Giving 2 stars because his advice is actually useful. But good luck getting from good to great... because I believe, contrary to what the book suggests, that you do need luck

The good: interesting research, useful advice, great writing.
The not so good: the findings are not nearly as scientific, timeless, or widely applicable as the book claims.

The idea behind this book is that Collins and his team researched a large number of public companies, came up with a list of 11 that made a jump from "good performance" to "great performance" (i.e., significantly out-performed the market) over a sustained period of time, compared those 11 companies with 17 similar companies that never made the jump to "great" (or made the jump but couldn't sustain it), and based on this comparison, came up with a list of 7 "timeless principles" that it takes to go from good to great. Those 7 principles are:

1. Level 5 Leadership: Leaders who are humble, but driven to do what's best for the company. This concept reminded of the type of leader described in the book, "The Captain Class." That is, good leadership is not about charisma, but about "carrying the water."

2. First Who, Then What: Get the right people on the bus, then figure out where to go. Find the right people and try them out in different seats on the bus (different positions in the company). One interesting tidbit I found was that bigger compensation does NOT incentivize better performance (similar to what is argued in the book "Drive"). Instead, compensation is there to get the right people on the bus—that is, the key point of compensation is to hire and retain talent.

3. Confront the Brutal Facts: The Stockdale paradox—Confront the brutal truth of the situation, yet at the same time, never give up hope. I especially liked the idea of turn information into "information you can’t ignore." For example, don't just do surveys of how customers feel about the product; instead, let a customer decide how much to pay for your product (or not pay at all!) based on how happy they are. That is information you won't be able to ignore!

4. Hedgehog Concept: Three overlapping circles: What lights your fire ("passion")? What could you be best in the world at ("best at")—and what can you not be the best in the world at? What makes you money ("driving resource")?

5. Culture of Discipline: Rinsing the cottage cheese. The idea is not to be a strict, harsh ruler, but to offer employees "freedom and responsibility within a framework." That is, you should hire self-disciplined people who don’t need to be managed and instead, focus all your time on managing the system.

6. Technology Accelerators: Using technology to accelerate growth, within the three circles of the hedgehog concept.

7. The Flywheel: The additive effect of many small initiatives; they act on each other like compound interest. Alignment and motivation follows from results—not the other way around. So don't bother spending time on team building exercises or trying to motivate people; instead, manage the system, get results, and that will get the team to bond and be motivated.

While I agree with many of these principles, I don't find the research convincing that (a) it is precisely these characteristics that are necessary to go from good to great or (b) that even if these are the right characteristics, that they apply to the vast majority of companies.

For one thing, the sample size—just 11 companies out of the millions that are out there—is way too small. Maybe it's because I just finished reading "Fooled by Randomness," but 11 wild successes out of a pool of millions strikes me as far more likely to be due to luck (and path dependence!) than strategy. The book tries to reduce the effect of luck by picking a long time timeline (15+ years), but if we had millions of monkeys picking stocks completely at random for a 15 year period, at the end of that period, it would not surprise me if a small number of those monkeys (say, 11) were wildly successful, simply through dumb luck. If this book had identified principles that were present in thousands of companies that were successful and absent in thousands of companies that failed, the argument might have been more convincing, but as it is, I have to more or less dismiss the book's claims that their results are "scientific" (and that's without even getting into the causation vs correlation debate!).

Lending more evidence to this argument of randomness is that the 11 "great" companies are not all paragons of success nowadays:

- Circuit City: filed for bankruptcy in 2008
- Fannie Mae: the book touts their "creative" mortgage practices which, as it turns out, played a major role in the 2008 mortgage crisis
- Gillette: touted as an example of refusing acquisition, but was then acquired by Procter & Gamble in 2005
- Philip Morris: I have no desire to follow practices from cigarette companies
- Wells Fargo: touted as a shining example of great leadership, but lawsuits have revealed a vast array of illegal practices, including massive account fraud in 2016 that implicated the CEO.

So nearly half of the 11 companies this book is based on are questionable, at best. Collins takes this issue heads on, saying that if some of the 11 companies struggle after the book is published, it just means that they are no longer following the 7 timeless principles. But to me, this is just a tautological "No true Scotsman" argument.

Finally, perhaps what bothers me most is that these 7 timeless principles come from research of gigantic public companies. I understand the book focuses on public companies because there's far more data available on public companies than private, but I'm not convinced that the findings from a handful of gigantic, publicly-traded corporations can be applied to 99.9% of business out there, and even less convinced by the book's argument that these learnings apply to other types of organizations too (e.g., churches, sports teams, etc).

Having said all that, I still think the 7 principles _are_ useful. The team that wrote this book is smart, talked with a lot of successful companies, and did find some useful insights. But the key thing to understand is that what they found are *tools*, not underlying principles. These are not laws of physics that have explanatory or predictive power, but merely observations of a few techniques that can be useful when trying to build a great company. If you think of this book as something to add to your toolbelt, you can get something useful out of it. If you think of it as a bible of how to build a great company, you may be disappointed.


As always, I've saved some of my favorite quotes:

“Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don't have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don't have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.”

“The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.”

“You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit. —HARRY S. TRUMAN”

“It is no harder to build something great than to build something good. It might be statistically more rare, it but does not require more suffering than perpetuating mediocrity. It involves less suffering, and perhaps even less work.” <--- I especially like this. Building something great does not require more suffering, but is vastly more satisfying.