From Excellence to Greatness (New Edition)

Author: Collins
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: Another masterpiece by the author of the bestseller Good to Great:。Collins and his 21-person team conducted a 5-year study, and only 11 companies, such as Gillette and Bank of America, achieved the leap from excellent to outstanding performance. By comparing them with companies that failed to make the leap, they analyzed the internal mechanisms behind this transformation. Collins believes that "if adopted and implemented diligently, almost all companies can significantly improve their performance and even become outstanding companies," because the answer to moving from good to great "is not limited by time or geography and universally applicable to any organization."
Business Week: Top 10 Business Books of 2001; Amazon: Best Business Book of 2001, a bestseller by the author of Good to Great, based on five years of research, "worth billions but unbuyable." Collins and his research team spent 10.5 person-years, reading and systematically organizing 6,000 articles, recording over 2,000 pages of interview content, creating 384 gigabytes of computer data, collecting all articles from 28 companies over the past 50 years (or earlier), and conducting extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses to arrive at the astonishing and inspiring answers to how companies can move from good to great. This book is another masterpiece by Collins, the author of the bestseller Good to Great, which outlines the grand blueprint for excellent companies to achieve the leap to greatness. Good to Great revealed the secrets of maintaining excellence, but the companies mentioned in the book were consistently outstanding from the beginning. For companies with mediocre performance, how can they achieve the leap from good to great? Do outstanding companies possess a special "genius of excellence"? Are development bottlenecks truly insurmountable? To address this question, Collins and his 21-person research team conducted a massive study over five years, analyzing each company (over 1,400) in the annual Fortune 500 rankings since 1965. The results were shocking—only 11 companies achieved the leap from good to great performance, including Gillette, Kimberly-Clark, Bank of America, and Philip Morris. Over 15 years, the average cumulative stock returns of these companies were 6.9 times the market index (while even world-renowned companies like GE only achieved 2.8 times), meaning that if you had invested 1 dollar in one of these companies in 1965 through a mutual fund, by 2000, that investment would have grown 471 times, compared to only 56 times for the average stock fund in the market. How did these companies outperform even the superstars among them, such as Intel and Coca-Cola? Collins compared these 11 companies with those that achieved the leap but could not sustain it, as well as those that failed to make the leap, to analyze the underlying mechanisms. Collins found that a company's move from good to great has nothing to do with whether it is in a trendy industry. In fact, even a traditional company, even if initially obscure, can achieve excellence. Collins proposed a set of ideas: "if adopted and implemented diligently, almost all companies can significantly improve their performance and even become outstanding companies," because the answer to moving from good to great "is not limited by time or geography and universally applicable to any organization." Collins and his research team spent 10.5 person-years, reading and systematically organizing 6,000 articles, recording over 2,000 pages of interview content, creating 384 gigabytes of computer data, collecting all articles from 28 companies over the past 50 years (or earlier), and conducting extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses to arrive at the astonishing and inspiring answers to how companies can move from good to great.
· Inviting revered celebrities from outside the company to lead often has a negative effect on the leap from good to great.
· Managers' compensation structures are unrelated to driving company performance.
· Companies that achieved the leap did not spend more time on long-term strategy formulation than others.
· Technology and technology-driven changes do not actually inspire the leap from good to great.
· Mergers and acquisitions do not play any role in driving the leap.
· Companies that achieved the leap did not deliberately create transformations, motivate employees, or foster a unified company atmosphere.
· Revolutionary leaps do not necessarily require revolutionary processes.
· Companies that achieved the leap were not in booming industries; some were even in dire situations.
· Excellence is not a product of the environment; to a large extent, it is the result of prudent decision-making.