Good to Great

The biggest takeaway from this book, Good to Great, by Jim Collins is great things cannot be created over a night. It takes time and effort and sometime failures are required on the way to get to “Great”. Collins himself spent more than 40 years to examine 1435 good companies’s performance for his research. Also, he and his team read almost 6,000 article to get part of their research done, and because of their time and effort we can read this great book which has a couple hundreds pages.(Collins, 28). In his book, he introduces “A Culture of Discipline”. He explains that different between great companies and non-great companies is that leaders of great companies know how to make culture that stimulate the will of followers. To have “A Culture of Discipline”, the leader need to get right people on the right seats in the bus (First Who...Then What), and make it clear what his core business which can be the best in the world (The Hedgehog Concept) (Collins 12). I think that the hardest thing is to find out what their core business which can beat any other organization because they are required not only to know their own company well but also know about competitors. It can be found after having many experiences, both good and bad ones, and discussions. As he says the process of transforming from a good company to a great company is like a “Flywheel”. A flywheel is extremely heavy and takes huge effort to get it start moving. By pushing the wheel continually will have the wheel turn itself and generate its own momentum. That how it looks like when a company start turning into a great one, time and effort are essential to changing things.

In this book, many things are very simple and common things for good leadership. Some things were things we talked in my classes. However, by using well-done research and lots of case studies as references, it make his arguments incredibly persuasive. Culture, for instance, is such common topic to be talked about in Business, Management, and Hospitality classes as an important thing for organization and people within the organization. The way he demonstrates the importance of culture has series. The topics he talks about after and before are strongly related and make more sense to the readers. By reading his points about culture, I understand it in this way, if the leaders can create a great culture which can last for long time even if the leader changes, it can be a strength of the organization to transform to great company, and still remember as one of lesson learned from this book.

While I was reading this book, I often linked the leadership Collins discusses to Transformational leadership with excellent people-oriented behaviors. First of all, this book is about how to transform a non-great company to a great one. While he talks about how the leaders choose, invest, transform, and support their followers, he also touches points such as sharing vision, building trust, or lead by examples.