Good to Great
Answers to commonly asked questions about how good-to-great principles can help social sector organizations make the leap to greatness, using interviews with over 100 social sector leaders.
Stats for nerds
71recommend
210mentions
166people
2007–2026years
40% recommend43% neutral17% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- See the discussion of alignment in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_Great
which can be summarized as "You have alignment because your business makes sense, you can't paint alignment on to your business as an afterthought" Go read the book though because Collins says it very well.
- I recommend people read the book Good To Great by Jim Collins. The most admired leaders were the people who positioned themselves to receive admiration, but they also tended to be the least effective. Likewise the most effective leaders, according to various metrics, tended to be people who humbly avoided the media and self-promotion.
My take away from this is that uniformed people will believe exactly what you tell them to believe. The tremendous effort that goes into that distracts from the responsibilities or running an organization. So, don't let the unexperienced dictate the criteria for success. I see this a lot in software, people without experience attempting to artificially dictate the terms of success.
- "Good to Great" was a great book, but it did use Flywheel to describe a growth situation as opposed to a steady state which is bad physics but, hey, corporations are out-of-equilibrium systems.
- While there is certainly a lot of crap out there for business books, especially on sales/marketing and management, there are some core books that are must reads if you want to save 30 years of trial and error.
1. E-myth Revisited (absolute must read for small to midsize business owners) 2. Competitive Strategy 3. Discipline of Market Leaders 4. Good to Great 5. Built to Last
- A better title to this would have been “MOST Business Books are Entertainment, Not Strategic Tools.”
Certainly, there are the fad books that are useless, but some are quite good and useful. In addition to Good to Great, I’d also include Crossing the Chasm, the Innovator’s Dilemma, Positioning, and The Culting of Brands.
The fact that the author recommends four books at the end shows he really doesn’t believe his own title.
- * A Thousand Splendid Suns
* Foundation and Empire
* On Liberty
* Good to Great
Those books shaped how I interact with other people, which is:
* I will move forward. I am not waiting for you to make a decision. If you need time then it’s on your own time and can catch up at your liability, otherwise it’s absolute empathy and self-sacrifice in all things.
* As for other people I want to avoid people that state firm conclusions lacking evidence or measures. I consider that stupidity but it could just be bias or autism. Either way it’s a problem. If people do that and can’t help but talk about themselves then they are definitely either autistic or a sociopath. If those people are charming then they are definitely sociopaths.
