Good to Great

Collins’s remarkably popular books share a common theme: how and why businesses fail or thrive. That’s his area of study, and he draws deeply on his research to produce in-depth examinations of the forces that sustain or undermine businesses. Collins writes, as you might expect, like a business consultant. The readers most likely to relish his unadorned, commonsense style are businesspeople. But his generally pedestrian prose doesn’t keep him from producing memorable, pithy aphorisms like, “While you can buy your way to growth, you absolutely cannot buy your way to greatness.”

Anyone seeking ideas about building a top-flight organization with a culture to match can gain wisdom from Collins’s way of thinking and presenting information.