Clear, realistic, and inspiring in its banality

Review of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by James C. Collins

This is a good business book: it is eminently practical, well written, and in my own investigations I have seen exactly what the author is talking about.  Stories are also interwoven in the book in a way that is a useful and interesting. They greatly add to the text rather act as filler to stretch it to book length. Indeed, this is one of the few business books I know that is worth reading all the way through, whereas most can be digested solely from reading at most the first chapter and at worst, the cover blurbs.

Simply put, Collins et al advocate putting the right people in the right place (“on the bus”), then carefully developing a simple and utterly clear vision of where to go (the “hedgehog concept”), and finally to make incremental steps that add up into major breakthroughs (“moving the flywheel”).

Time and again, I have seen this pattern in the successful companies that I have been in, from China and Italy to the US: you get a real leader who is tough yet fair and self-effacing, who develops a common vision through trial and error, and then people join in willingly and work extremely hard to realize a common vision. This book offers a framework to analyze these ideas systematically and I will use it for years to come.

Highly recommended.  However common-sensical this all may sound, everyone can learn from this, particularly in the detailed stories, but also in the lists of ideas. This book is based on data that Collins’ team exhaustively researched and so has empirical proof.