From Excellence to Perfection: Because of Excellence, It's Hard to Reach Perfection (New Edition)

Author: (USA) Collins
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: This book is another masterpiece by Collins, the author of the bestseller Good to Great. It outlines the grand blueprint for excellent companies to achieve the leap to greatness. Good to Great revealed the secrets to maintaining corporate excellence, but the companies mentioned in the book were consistently top performers from the start. For those companies with mediocre performance, how can they make the leap from good to great? Do all great companies possess a so-called "genius"? Are development bottlenecks truly insurmountable? To address this question, Collins and his research team of 21 conducted an extensive study over five years, analyzing every company (over 1,400) in the annual Fortune 500 rankings since 1965. The results were astonishing—only 11 companies achieved the leap from good performance to great performance, including Gillette, Kimberly-Clark, Wachovia, Philip Morris, and others. Over a 15-year period, the average cumulative stock returns of these companies were 6.9 times the market index (while even world-renowned giants like GE only achieved 2.8 times). In other words, if you had invested 1 dollar in one of these companies through a mutual fund in 1965, by 2000, that investment would have grown 471 times, compared to only 56 times for the average stock fund in the market. What aspects did these companies that achieved the leap outperform even the superstars among them, such as Intel or 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 achieve it, analyzing the underlying mechanisms of this transition. Collins found that a company's transition from good to great has nothing to do with whether it is in a trendy industry. In fact, even a traditional industry company, even if it starts out obscure, can achieve greatness. Collins proposed a set of views: "As long as they are adopted and implemented seriously, almost all companies can significantly improve their performance and even become great companies," because the answer to the transition from good to great "is not limited by time or geography and universally applies 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, and collecting all articles from 28 companies over the past 50 years—or even longer—for extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis, arriving at the astonishing and inspiring answers to how companies can transition from good to great.
· Inviting revered celebrities from outside the company to lead often has a negative effect on the transition from good to great.
· Managers' compensation structures are unrelated to driving corporate performance.
· Companies that achieve the leap do not spend more time on long-term strategic planning than other companies.
· Technology and technological-driven changes do not actually inspire the transition from good to great.
· Mergers and acquisitions do not play any role in driving the transition.
· Companies that achieve the leap do not deliberately create change, motivate employees, or foster a unified company atmosphere.
· Revolutionary leaps do not necessarily require revolutionary processes.
· Companies that achieve the leap are not in booming industries; some are even in struggling sectors.
· Greatness is not a product of the environment; to a large extent, it is the result of prudent decision-making.