Good to Great: A Preface
My preface to Good to Great
I often find myself bringing up Jim Collins’ book Good to Great when hanging out with good friends. My wife makes fun of me, promising to buy a handful of paperback copies, getting me to write my personal testimony of the book on the title page, and then I can give them away to friends because I’m such a believer. I think I’ll save us some money and time and I’ll just write about it.
So before I dig into 7 of the main principles over the next few weeks, I want to set the stage.
Upfront, this book has changed my life. It’s changed the way I think and the way I work – I’m not kidding. While the book focuses on an academic study of businesses, I find the conclusions the study presents are not only applicable to the world of business or economics. I’ve found them to be a part of the greater whole of sound principles upon which I can and have based many decisions.
The book is the result of a study Jim Collins did with a group of researchers. The question they asked was, what made companies not just good, but great? What was it that made certain companies beat their successful competitors by a significant margin? As a result, Collins wrote the book Good to Great and has a number of great examples to present with his results.
My intent over the next few weeks is to write about 7 of the key conclusions. The topics will be Level 5 Leaders, first who/then what, confront the brutal facts, hedgehog concept, culture of discipline, technology accelerators, flywheel and doom loop.
On some of these topics I have a lot to say and others, meh, I just don’t get excited about. The point is, these ideas and principles have ultimately changed the way I make decisions and look at the way I do things. And the application is limitless. In other words, I made connections between these ideas and other fields in my life to include marriage, my career, fatherhood, music, religion, politics, and academia.
For those who will follow this discussion for the next few weeks, I really urge you to make connections. Do you see connections from these principles to your life? If so, please share.
That’s my testimony 🙂
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