Good to Great Summary & key ideas explained

Picture two grocery chains, two drugstore chains, two steelmakers. Same industry, same decade, same customers. Thirty years later, one is a legend and the other is gone or forgotten. What happened?

Jim Collins couldn't let that question go. His earlier book, Built to Last, had studied companies that were great from the start. But most companies aren't born great. They're merely fine. So Collins and a team of researchers spent five years hunting for companies that had been ordinary for a long time and then, at a clear turning point, became extraordinary.

The bar was brutal. A company had to match or trail the stock market for fifteen years, then beat it by at least three times over the next fifteen. Out of 1,435 companies that had appeared on the Fortune 500, only 11 cleared it. Their stocks went on to average almost seven times the market. Each one was paired with a rival in the same industry that had the same chances and didn't make the leap.

Then the team compared the pairs, looking for what the winners did that the others didn't.

Collins opens with a line that sounds strange at first: good is the enemy of great. Being good is comfortable, and comfort is exactly what keeps most people and companies from ever trying for more.

So what does it take to break out? The first finding surprised the researchers themselves. It was about the person at the top, and it was nothing like the celebrity CEOs on magazine covers.