Here’s why — It gives you better optionality should you need to be acquired or raise capital from a strategic partner later down the road, one or two years in. If you are somebody that is in a position where you can take more equity and you believe in the company, it’s higher risk but higher reward. After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and …

It’s exactly why you really want to make sure you’re having that open conversation with your co-founder. There’s also just this openness and honesty that we have with each other. We were constantly trying to look at that viral loop and look at how do we take one of the invitees and turn them into a creator. You can push it.” Or, “Hey, Jane, you’re going up a hill. He further states that investing in the portfolio of the 11 companies covered by the book, in the year of 2001, would actually result in underperforming the S&P 500.

Please try again. But you’re a company that we already know and love.

Here is a link to download the audio instead.

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 results for at least fifteen years.

For early-stage Founders, it’s rare to get a candid view into what happens behind the scenes of companies that break out from the pack.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. Jim Collins is a student and teacher of what makes great companies tick, and a Socratic advisor to leaders in the business and social sectors. Wells Fargo, a good to great awardee, aren't so noble anymore given their recent scandals.

From its 1973 nadir to 2000, the company bested many of the most famous companies in the world, including Coca-Cola, Motorola, and Hewlett-Packard. That’s what we would need to put the pedal to the metal on marketing and drive CAC down.

We were a good company.

As the co-founder of Evite (sold to IAC), CTO and President of SurveyMonkey, and then cofounder of Gixo (sold to Openfit), she has built companies that have shaped a generation of products and been used the world over. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority?


She’s published dozens of articles and book reviews spanning a wide range of topics, including health, relationships, psychology, science, and much more. 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 into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. During the 1960s, however, the company was forced by a consent decree to license its patents to competitors for free, ending its monopoly and setting off a steep decline punctuated by silly acquisitions and ill-advised joint ventures. In 2012 and 2013, he had the honor to serve a two-year appointment as the Class of 1951 Chair for the Study of Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Climb over professional blockages, conquer employee conflict, walk across fire pits of angry clients & crawl through cut-throat halls of competition. Interest-specific online venues will often provide a book buying opportunity. That is partially why we decided to sell the business because we realized that to grow Gixo, we would need to take a large, large amount of capital to create a brand.

When someone is interested in buying your company, obviously you have to figure out how to set some pricing. The Three Cirlces and the Resource Engine.

This is not to suggest, however, that executives at all levels wouldn't benefit from reading this book; after all, only 11 companies managed to figure out how to change their B grade to an A on their own. For example, Darwin E. Smith, CEO of Kimberly-Clark from the 70s through the 90s, was no darling of reporters: He wore unfashionable suits, was uncomfortable in interviews, and preferred the company of manual laborers to that of fellow executives.

Our risk tolerances were different based on our history. I just can't take the book's advice seriously given the track record of several of the companies studied. Copyright © 2020 HarperCollins Publishers All rights reserved. To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. Why?

There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. It was a good valuation.

Jim Collins recounts on the first page of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't, that the idea for his book came from a remark I made at a salon dinner I … Ultimately when those hard decisions come — whether it’s an offer on the table, or you’re dealing with an employee issue, or you’re trying to figure out how much funding to take — you have already established some of that base level conversation.