Jim Colins (1958–)

Built to Last, the defining management study of the '90s, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning.

But what about companies that are not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? Are there those that convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? If so, what are the distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

Over five years, Jim Collins and his research team have analyzed the histories of 28 companies, discovering why some companies make the leap and others don't. Read about their findings in Good to Great.… (más)

There appear to be some interesting ideas in this book, but overall, it seems to be a case of the author simply choosing a set of companies that happened to meet some criteria, then looking for similar facts about those companies, and calling them causes that the companies met the criteria.

Maybe I've been reading too many books about biases and fallacies in statistics and behavior lately, but I think this is all luck. See rel="nofollow" target="_top">http://www.happen.com/article/good-to-great-or-just-lucky/ for another similar view.

As Steven Levitt (http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/07/28/from-good-to-great-to-below-average/) says, these companies have done worse than the overall market since this book was written. I understand Jim Collins has written a later book studying why companies fail, to somewhat try to explain this.

But the simpler explanation is that it's all luck. It was interesting to me to read in Good to Great that when the company CEOs were asked about what they have done to make their companies great, a lot of them said they were lucky. Collins did not take them at face value, but rather, decided that a characteristic of good CEOs is that they are humble and explain their successes as good luck. And similarly, bad CEOs blame their failures on bad luck.

But what if it just is all luck? Isn't that a simpler explanation.

I'm not saying there are factors that make a company successful or not, but this book hasn't convinced me of what any of them are by its use of data, which seems to fail many common tests.… (más)