2 ⭐️'s: Read the chapter list, that may be all you need.

General run-of-the-mill business book full of generic platitudes, and slightly annoying catch phrases (hello Hedgehog, Flywheel, and BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal)). Vague themes seem intended for mass appeal, as opposed to providing any practical advice.

To save you time, here are the chapters:

1) Good is the Enemy of Great
2) Level 5 Leadership
3) First Who, Then What
4) Confront the Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith)
5) The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity Within the Three Circles)
6) A Culture of Discipline
7) Technology Accelerators
8) The Flywheel and the Doom Loop
9) From Good to Great to Built to Last

Maybe if this is one of the first business books you've ever read it will hold more water. If you've read even a handful, you'll find nothing new here. Much of the book deals with common sense and well known facts, put into cutesy sayings. For example:

"The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there.

No, they first got the right people on the bus—and the wrong people off the bus—and then figured out where to drive it."

The right people will be self motivated? It takes the right people to be great? Thank you for the insight! Facts are better than dreams? I never realized!

Technology can help a business be great, but it is only an accelerant, not a creator of momentum. "Thoughtless reliance on technology is a liability, not an asset." "Good to great companies continually refine the path to greatness with the brutal facts of reality." "There is nothing wrong with pursuing a vision for greatness." Success takes time and discipline, and you should focus on what you can do better than any other company. "Disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action—that's it, that's the essence of the breakthrough process."

I'll stop here, you get the idea.

n  tl;drn

Printed in 2001, you can find plenty of succinct summaries online, often with graphs. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood, but this book irritated me good ... to a great amount.


~ Epilogue: "Resiliency, not perfection, is the signature of greatness." Collins updated the epilogue a decade later and defended his choice of companies in case studies, some of which went under in the interim. Just because a company becomes great, does not mean it will stay great. ~

Favorite Quotes:

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

“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.”

"It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction."
— Pablo Picasso

Good to Great hit it out of the park for me. His answer to the question, "why should we attempt to be great?" is worth the price of admission. I found myself making changes to my daily practice as I read through this book. There is a lot here.

I would give it 31/2stars. Really insightful concepts. I liked how there was thorough research before presenting these ideas. Towards the end it started to become a little repetitive.

"People often ask, "what motivates you to undertake these huge research projects?"
It's a good question. The answer is "curiosity."
There is nothing I find more exciting than picking a question that I don't know the answer to and embarking on a quest for answers. It's deeply satisfying to climb into the boat, like Lewis and Clark, and head west, saying," We don't know what we will find when we get there, but we'll be sure to let you know when we get back."

This undaunted curiosity is the stimulus of this work, proclaims the author, in the beginning, justifying why he got down to such a grueling task. Though this book is exclusively for the management students and for the corporate guys, I still feel, this book is very well researched and can be read by them also, who have the least interests in companies and businesses. This book is a result of the hard toil of a large research team of Jim Collins after 'Built to Last'.If you read it, you will find the reason why millions of copies have been sold of this. Wall Street Journal's CEO council declared it the best management book they have read.

This book is all about why some companies leap from 'good to great' and others don't!
The first thing it tries to preach is that Good is the enemy of great.Few people attain greatness, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life. Next, the book talks about a kind of 'Level 5 leadership',

"leaders of a paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will.they are fanatically driven, infected with an incurable need to produce sustainable results. they display workmanlike diligence, more plow horse than show horse. they look out of a window to attribute success to factors other than themselves."

In the subsequent chapters, comes the idea of choosing the right guys. It's important first getting the right people on the bus (and wrong people off the bus) and then figure out where to drive it.
Then there is a 'Stockdale Paradox' in this book, which is equally applicable in any field of life.

"Retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties.....And at the same time ......Confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."

There are many other concepts outlined in this book, they look technical, so much business involved in them, but they are quite handy even to the simpler minds, quite comprehensible even to those ordinary mortals like me. The research done for this book may have taken a huge amount of resources, time and energy, but as a consequence, the major findings and learnings of this project are rather uncomplicated. The key elements of greatness are deceptively simple and straightforward. I feel this book is a wonderful exhibition of undemanding intelligence encrusted with due diligence.

In the end, Even if you think in contrast. If you think you are already gratified to the goodness around you and think after reading the title of this book.....Why greatness? I don't need that!
Then the book has an answer for you as well. It says it's almost a nonsense question. If you are engaged in a work that you love and care about, for whatever reason, then the question needs no answer.

The question is not why, but how!

Ugh. Nothing says Boring Stories than studying the "top companies" as measured by their stock-market performance in the late 20th century. Excuse me while I stab myself with a sharpened corporate annual report.

In the intro, I recognized one company (out of the 11 "good to great") that no longer exists and two that were implicated in the real estate bubble and 2008 financial crisis. Further, I was very disturbed to learn the author went into the study without any theory of what should make a company great. This would undoubtedly lead to some kind of narrative or hindsight bias after staring at the data hard enough. Last, the arbitrary choice of a 15 year performance horizon sounds fishy. Three red flags in the first 30 minutes and I put it down.

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.

I was hoping this book would give me some guidelines to remember when I start my own business. There were a few good points, but nothing compelling. Reading this book wasn't a very good use of my time.

Tips from the book:

First Who, then What
First, get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off it), then figure out where to drive. Having the right people in the company is more important than deciding what the company will do, because the right people will help make that decision anyway. Whether a person is "right" or not depends on their character more than their knowledge and skills. Don't waste time dealing with people who aren't contributing; fire them ASAP.

Don't waste effort trying to motivate people; the right people are self-motivated. All you have to do is keep from de-motivating them.

The Hedgehog Concept
To become great, use the Hedgehog Concept: concentrate on the point of intersection between what you are passionate about, what you can be the best in the world at, and what drives your economic engine. The Hedgehog Concept is named for the simple hedgehog that does one thing well (curling up for defense), and is able to defeat the crafty fox which knows many things but acts inconsistently.

A Culture of Discipline
Ignore "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunities unless they fit in the 3 circles of the Hedgehog Concept.

Don't treat budgeting as allocating amounts of money to activities, but choose Hedgehog Concept activities to fully fund, and don't fund others. "Stop doing" lists are more important than "to do" lists.

Technology Accelerators
Does the technology fit directly with your Hedgehog Concept? If yes, then pioneer that technology. If not, settle for parity with your competitors, or ignore it.

Greatness happens as a result of long-term, consistent behavior, not a sudden lucky break or killer app.

Just (12/21/2011) re-read the book and love the concepts. But I knocked a star off of my rating since during this re-read I felt like the author puffed up the findings and, indirectly, himself. Sure, good-to-great principles seem to be true, insightful, and necessary for a transformation. I even found that re-reading this book helped me to realize I was being quite undisciplined in my use of time (trying to create momentum by doing, doing, doing instead of "unplugging extraneous junk.") But I don't think Collins has found the gospel and he plays it up to that level.


I started reading it and then gave it to my boss. I'm currently listening to the audio book but I would like to own a hardcover copy. (2007)

The concept that has struck me as most applicable (so far), particularly with respect to businesses, is the need to get the right people on the team first and in the right positions, then decide what to do. Managers should not waste time and energy motivating people to excellence. Instead, they should give self-motivating people a vision they can support and work hard to bring to realization. Fewer great people on the team are better than lots of mediocre people. The mediocre people just make extra work for the great people and the net result is "good". It's easier to be great than good.

Another interesting concept I've been told about, but haven't read about yet, is the flywheel. Progress is made by implementing small changes at opportune times. Momentum is gained slowly and steadily by these small, periodic decisions. The image used by Collins is that of a flywheel with lots of inertia. Each little push eases the flywheel ahead. The wheel starts rotating slowly but as little pushes continue to be made, the wheel picks up momentum and is hard to stop. This concept is seen in the growth that companies like Google have experienced. Google started out as just a slightly better search engine. Small changes at opportune times have turned it into the booming multi-service company that it is today

Bản tiếng anh sẽ đem lại khó khăn nhưng có lẽ sẽ dễ hiểu hơn tiếng việt.
Về nội dung, cuốn sách dường như là một nghiên cứu lớn, chi tiết và nghiêm túc về sự dẫn dầu.
Tôi có học hỏi nhiều điều qua các trang sách, do bố cục rõ ràng và dễ nhớ, nhưng với bản tính của người đã từng nghiên cứu, tôi không khỏi đặt ra những câu hỏi nghi ngờ về tính đúng đắn và xác thực.
Anyway, mỗi cuốn sách đều có thể gợi nên những ý tưởng mà chính nó cũng không tính trước được.

If there is a single idea guiding this book, it would be discipline. Great companies have disciplined people, disciplined teams and disciplined culture. While there are many ideas and small differences between good and great, what stuck with me most is the hedgehog concept which I relate to a winning strategy and the core of an enterprise.

Oh my god!

This book makes me FREAK OUT!!!

It’s so DAMN GOOD.

No!

FUCK THAT!!!

It’s FUCKIN GREAT