The Challenge:

Built to Last, the seminal management study of the 1990s, demonstrated how outstanding businesses endure over time and how sustained long-term performance can be built into an organization's DNA from day one.

But what about the business that didn't have stellar DNA from the start? How can good, middling, or even bad businesses acquire long-lasting greatness?

The Study:

Jim Collins struggled with this query for a long time. Exist any businesses that defy gravity and turn what would otherwise be long-term inferiority into long-term superiority? If so, what are the unifying traits that enable a business to advance from good to great?

The Standards:

Collins and his research team selected a group of outstanding businesses using strict criteria that made the transition to great performance and maintained those results for at least fifteen years.

Really great?

The good-to-great companies produced cumulative stock returns after the leap that outperformed the general stock market by an average of seven times over a period of fifteen years, outperforming by more than twice the performance of a composite index of the world's most successful businesses, such as Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

The comparisons:

A carefully chosen group of comparable companies that failed to make the transition from good to great were compared to the good-to-great organizations by the research team.

What had changed? Why did one group of businesses achieve truly excellent performance while the other group maintained only good performance?

All twenty-eight of the participating companies' histories were examined by the team over a five-year period. Collins and his team identified the primary determinants of greatness—the reasons why some businesses succeed and others fail—after poring over mountains of data and hundreds of pages of interviews.

The Findings:
Many readers will be surprised by the findings of the Good to Great study, which shed light on practically every aspect of management strategy and practice. The results show:

Level 5 Leaders: The research team was astounded to learn the kind of leadership needed to achieve greatness.

(Simplicity within the Three Circles) The Hedgehog Concept Overcoming the curse of competence is necessary to progress from excellent to great.

A culture of discipline: When an entrepreneurial ethic and a culture of discipline are combined, amazing outcomes are the consequence. Technology Accelerators: Successful businesses have diverse perspectives on the use of technology.

The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who implement drastic change initiatives and traumatic restructurings will almost surely fall short.

Jim Collins said that several of the study's core ideas "fly in the face of our contemporary business culture and will, quite honestly, offend some individuals."

DISCLAIMER : The information contained in this synopsis is not intended to serve as a replacement for the original work. As a supplement, it should help the reader grasp the main points even more completely. In other words, this summary is meant to entice the reader into purchasing the full version of the book for even deeper reading and analysis.