Read: Good to Great

Good to Great definitely lived up to its hype as ‘The Business Idea of the Year” (by Fast Company – a great magazine, BTW), with solid argument for the reasons why some companies make the leap from a ‘good company’ (the middle-of-the-line players in an industry) to join the ranks of ‘great companies’ (consistently high performing companies such as GE and Intel).

The more business books I read, the more I realize that the main points that these books seem to drive are relatively simple that you can probably summarize them in a paragraph of bullet points – actually, I’ve seen advertisements for these ‘executive summary’ types of Cliff Note service in the back of respectable business magazines… tsk… tsk… It is the reflections on the key points, and supporting data and findings that provide effective base for the insights that illuminate these main points that distinguish a great business book from just good books. (*chuckle*) Good to Great was worth skipping the Cliff Note version and poring over every single page of it. In fact, even the Appendix (which takes up about ¼ of the actual volume) was an interesting reading, as the author and his team conducted a rather exhaustively systematic approach in digging up the supporting data, and the Appendices were chock full of revelations just as interesting as the ones that made the cut in the main content.

The key concepts behind what enabled companies to go from Good to Great are:

- Level 5 Leadership
- First Who… then What
- Confront the Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith)
- The Hedgehog Concept
- A Culture of Discipline
- Technology Accelerators
- The Flywheel and the Doom Loop

Each of these concepts, on its own, is worth a few minutes of contemplative reflection. For me, however, true epiphany hit me at the END of the book, when the author raised the question, ‘Why greatness?’ then immediately followed up with the following:

Indeed, the real question is not, “Why greatness?” but “What work makes you feel compelled to try to create greatness?” If you have to ask the question, “What should we try to make it great? Isn’t success enough” then you’re probably engaged in the wrong line of work.

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Whoa.

(Sorry… I could not resist the chance for another gratuitous Keanu Reeves imitation.)

Of course, Mel Gibson’s famous ‘not all men live…’ line in Braveheart also falls along the same line, but I guess why that line (Mel’s, I mean) is committed into most viewers’ memory is because it’s not just William Wallace’s admonition toward his cowardly countrymen (the flashy kilts and semi-homoerotic camaraderie notwithstanding), but a stirring reminder to the audience that a life without meaning is not a life worth living. (And ‘greatness’ transcends all classification boundaries in whatever men actually do; it is the ‘greatness’ that counts more than ‘great in what?’)

I doubt that ‘Wisdom According to a Scotsman: William Wallace Speaks’ would have made the #1 Business Book bestseller list, but Jim Collins’ arguments were just as revelatory – minus the burly, rough machismo a la Mel Gibson dramatization.

It’s worth a reading, friends… pick up Good to Great. (Or I’d be more than happy to loan you my copy for a pint of Guinness… er McEwan’s, I mean)