Good to Great

27 Jan 2017

The book is trying to look at the companies which have consistently (more than 15 years) beaten the market and performed significantly better than their peers in the same industry.

Some excerpts from the book’s ideas:

• Get a “Level 5” leader who believes in the company and its values
• Get the right people on the bus, and get the wrong people off it - as you only want real team players if the team is “playing hard” and not people just “good enough”. Most of the times they will leave by themselves or be “helped” by the others to take this decision.
• Confront the facts, no matter what they are saying. Blameless post mortem a concept which is present nowadays in lots of domains
• Focus / The Hedgehog concept - focus/select (on) one domain where the company has an advantage
• Flywheel / doom loop - which states that once the company is doing well everyone still needs to push for improvements and continue to work hard in order to keep the status of leadership, otherwise things will start going backwards/bad relatively fast

Most likely other reviewers will have gone through more in-depth presenting of the main ideas in the book, so if you’re after a more in-depth analysis Goodreads might be a better place.

In itself it’s not a bad book, but unfortunately also not a great book. Most of the book’s preachings can be applied only after a certain threshold in seniority and only for some particular types of companies I would say. Even though some of the ideas can be applied everywhere, these are nothing completely novel to be considered unheard of, or first time presented in a book.

I feel that some of the companies considered have an unfair advantage over others - which were most likely discarded - as for some the period considered ended in 2000, close to the dot-com boom (or bust?) which of course is not helping in the way the evaluation was conducted.

For some strange reason I took me really long to finish this book, and I feel that reading longer stretches of it helps it keep more consistent and makes the lecture more fluid, so I would really recommended it as a beach book.