Good to Great
Autor: Tylerchan719 • March 8, 2012 • Essay • 359 Words (2 Pages) • 1,261 Views
Jim Collins is coauthor of Built to Last, a national bestseller for over five years
with a million copies in print. A student of enduring great companies, he serves
as a teacher to leaders throughout the corporate and social sectors. Formerly a
faculty member at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where he
received the Distinguished Teaching Award, Jim now works from his
management research laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.
The Challenge: Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties
showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained
performance can be engineered in the DNA of an enterprise from the very
beginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How
can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring
greatness?
The Study: For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there
companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into longterm superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics
that cause a company to go from good to great?
The Standards: Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team
identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained
those great results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the goodto-great companies generated cumulative
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