Good to Great
A review of

Good to Great

Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t


Staying Great

by David Meyer

Jim Collins’s 2001 classic still has ample relevant wisdom to offer if greatness is your goal, even if some companies he tagged as examples didn’t have quite as long a run as he might have predicted.

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.


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