Good to Great

Sequel/prequel to Built to Last, and one of the books that got me hooked on business reading. It analyzes companies that outperformed their competitors by at least 3x for 15 years and lays out a repeating framework: the right people, the hedgehog concept, the culture of discipline, the flywheel. It generates enormous enthusiasm for building a business, and that is genuinely worth something. The caveat is that the empirical data part does not hold up. The research leaned on retrospective interviews and press coverage filtered through success, which is exactly what Rosenzweig dismantles in The Halo Effect, plus the hindsight and narrative biases Kahneman documents in Thinking, Fast and Slow. And time ran the experiment for us: almost none of the eleven companies became what Collins said they would. Circuit City is gone, Fannie Mae blew up right around when the book was celebrating it, and Wells Fargo went through its own scandals. I keep it at A tier because as a source of conviction and vocabulary it still delivers, but read it as fairy tale, not science. Also read Turning the Flywheel, which is an accessory monograph to this one.