Good to Great

Jim Collins is coauthor of Built to Last, a national bestseller for over five years

with a million copies in print. A student of enduring great companies, he serves

as a teacher to leaders throughout the corporate and social sectors. Formerly a

faculty member at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where he

received the Distinguished Teaching Award, Jim now works from his

management research laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.

The Challenge: Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties

showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained

performance can be engineered in the DNA of an enterprise from the very

beginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How

can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring

greatness?

The Study: For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there

companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into longterm superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics

that cause a company to go from good to great?

The Standards: Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team

identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained

those great results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the goodto-great companies generated cumulative

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