As promised the book review of Good to Great: Why some Companies makes the leap…and others don’t.

While strictly speaking Good to Great does not fit directly in with credit management, I have taken the liberty of reviewing the book here. I feel that although the book sets out the principles of transforming a good company into a great company, many of these principles can be applied at a management level and even a personal level – besides its a very good read.

Collin’s methodology in preparing the book was to set out certain criteria of what amounts to a great company, eg. share earnings, length of success and many others to narrow his study down to 11 US companies. He then also set out objective criteria to get 11 comparison companies as well as a number of companies that achieved “greatness” but did not sustain it for any length of time. From there he and his team analysis exactly what were the consistent factors that transformed these companies good into great.

The results he comes up make for good….um I mean great reading.

Concepts such as what he calls Level 5 leadership, where the CEOs of 11 companies turned out not to be the archetypical charismatic ego driven character but rather a pardox of humbleness coupled with driven ambition FOR the company.

On the topic of paradox he indentifies what he calls the Stockdale Paradox which was well reviewed and commented on in the Bnoopy Blog. If you don’t have the time to read that post now it is basically about having the ability to have unmoving faith in achieving the end result without losing the ability to confront the brutual facts of any particular situation, something alot of us do not do in the business as well personal part of our lifes.

There are a number of other great concepts worth looking at such as the Hedgehog concept and the Flywheel. All of these will benefit you whatever the role is you play in your company.

Collin’s writing style is as easy as it is griping – not the heavy academic analysis it could have been. I give it 4 thumbs up out of 5.