By Duncan Kinney
This month we have two book reviews for you. The management tome Good to Great and the short, snappy and inspiring REWORK.
Good to Great is written by Jim Collins, co-author of another oft-cited business book Built to Last. To give you an idea of what Good to Great is about, let’s examine its ISBN categories:
1. Leadership
2. Strategic planning
3. Organizational change
4. Technological innovations – Management
On the surface these topics seem dry, but Collins has done some darn fine research and has constructed some blazingly obvious conclusions and some very cool counterintuitive conclusions as well. When you consider the massive data sets used for this book, you really feel for the researchers. This book stands tall on the shoulders of grad students. Just wading through the thank-you section at the front of this book takes a good while.
Using some pretty tough benchmarks, Collins and his team identified 14 companies that made the transition from good to great. These were middling companies, getting returns at or below the general market, when, seemingly out of nowhere these companies sustained at least 15 years of success, beating the general market many times over. With their prey identified, Collins and his team wanted to know the process that turned these companies around.
So how did they do it? Funny sounding management jargon, of course! Hedgehog concepts, level 5 leaders and the flywheel of success. Now, if you’re not familiar with these terms, don’t worry. Collins explains them well. In order to make their concepts stickier, they use pretty awful management jargon to identify the underlying trends they uncovered in their research. For instance, the Hedgehog Concept, that is when you concentrate only on what you can be the best in the world at. If you stick with your company’s Hedgehog Concept you’ll do better than other companies that flail around from one trendy business idea to the next. Shocker!
This is not to say there is no value in the book or its findings. It’s just that I find concepts like this to be a writing crutch. Make it obvious and you shouldn’t have to give your concept a silly name.
The final chapter relates the concepts in Good to Great to the concepts in Jim Collin’s first book, Built to Last. As I have not read Built to Last, this chapter was darn well unreadable. The jargon you read in Good to Great makes sense as it’s built up throughout the book but to be dropped into a whole new genre of business management jargon was tough on the brain, especially as I read this part of the book in the back of a rented Grand Cherokee on the way to Vancouver from Calgary.
The book skews towards older organizations because companies had to have a minimum of 30 years of existence as a public company in order to qualify. This means that the companies that are analyzed tend towards the stodgy end of things; Phillip Morris, Walgreens, Fannie Mae, Kimberly Clark. This was an unfortunate byproduct of the rigorous standards they set in order to find companies that made the transition from good to great.
One of the biggest takeaways from this book was the idea of “stop doing” lists. I love this idea. I typically make a to-do list every day, piling task upon task. A stop doing list encourages you to simplify and take away from your daily load.
His thoughts and research on getting the right people on the bus was very well done. Again, this is an obvious concept, but in this case he attacks the obvious in a novel way.
So who’s going to get the most out of this book? Managers, executives, directors, entrepreneurs and anyone who wants to make an organization they belong to really sing. There are some worthwhile lessons in here and they don’t all have to be applied to a publicly traded company. Collins only used publicly traded companies for the book because it was easy to gather the data and analyze it.
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Category: Articles
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