Adage, Good Is the Enemy

¶ … adage, "Good is the enemy of great," (Collins, 2001, p. 1). Good to Great is written for those who want to achieve greatness. Described as a "researcher and management guru," James C. Collins has authored or co-authored six different books all hinging on the same concepts related to leadership and organizational development. Collins does base Good to Great on actual data and research on America's top organizations, to show that there are trends in the ways great companies succeed in dominating the market in their sector over the long run, versus the good companies that might do super one year and then die out after failing to implement one or more of the seven main principles of organizational greatness. Those seven principles, identified by analyzing the "great" companies, comprise the bulk of Collin's Good to Great. The book is written for a general audience, and is therefore highly simplistic and written in a familiar rather than a scholarly tone. However, the book contains core organizational strategy principles that can be developed at greater length by scholarly research.

Collins writes Good the Great out of a general desire to pinpoint how and why good companies become great companies. The author describes his motivation for writing Good to Great explicitly, and states that "undaunted curiosity" motivated the research (Collins, 2001, p. 5). The research commenced by gathering a team of researchers. Collins operationalizes definitions and defines terms relatively clearly. For example, Collins and his research team define the organizational pattern of "good to great" as "fifteen year cumulative stock returns at or below the general stock market, punctuated by a transition point, then cumulative returns at least three times the market over the next fifteen years," (Collins, 2001, p. 6). The pattern had to exist independently of industry sector. Collins also acknowledges that the operational definition of "greatness" is limited to financial parameters because including elements like social responsibility or ethics into the concept of greatness would prove to be too complicated and perhaps impede internal validity. In the final chapter of Good to Great, however, Collins does try to discuss how great companies are often those that do take steps to ensure social and environmental responsibility. Using these methods of data collection, Collins came to some surprising conclusions about what companies can be defined as "great."

Face validity is high with Good to Great. Most readers approaching the text will be genuinely interested in the subject, and also motivated by insatiable curiosity about how some organizations succeed and some do not; and why some organizations remain merely good while others become those great and enduring companies that change the market. Collins does not necessarily push the reader to think differently about what constitutes organizational success and greatness, as market share and stock values are certainly going to factor into the definition. However, Collins does push the reader to think differently about how companies achieve the goal of greatness. The seven principles come as a surprise, especially with regards to Collins' analysis of leadership styles. Similarly, one of the good to great principles uses the metaphor of the bus: it is more important to get the right people on the bus and then start driving. This bit of information seems counterintuitive, which certainly compels the reader to investigate the author's claim. Reviews of Good to Great are mixed, with a large number of reviewers calling Collins out on both internal and external validity.

Myatt (n.d.) states, " I had with a very intelligent man who referenced Good to Great as if he was quoting scripture, and referred to Jim Collins as if he were the Almighty Himself -- enough was finally enough." This comment is especially interesting in light of "the fact that the sales seem to be driven as much by churches as by businesspeople," (May, 2006). Yet many of the core principles in Good to Great are substantiated by scholarly literature. For example, Pfeffer & Veiga (1999) found that "research, experience, and common sense all increasingly point to a direct relationship between a company's financial success and its commitment to management practices that treat people as assets," (p. 37). These findings directly corroborate Collins' bus metaphor, expanded on in Chapter Two.

Collins' methodology is relatively straightforward. Starting without a specific hypothesis and only a set of research questions, Collins and his research team systematically coded 6000 articles related to the companies in question, and conducted interviews as well. The conclusions that form the meat of Good to Great are the results of this research. The methodology is far from being air tight, but for the general trade market, Collins' research will seem strong. One of the greatest apparent weaknesses of Good to Great is that the author does not refer to prior research, perform any type of literature review, or integrate peer-reviewed sources into the analysis. Instead, Collins cites himself and his prior work such as Built to Last.

Good to Great is about what Jim Collins wants to see and say. The glaring omission of homage to the litany of research on organizational success may indeed be one of the reasons why it has been easy for Good to Great to garner a cult following. Collins presents himself as a guru, and purports to offer what other researchers have never before done. The problem is that many of the conclusions Collins draws from the research are too generalized to be meaningful. They are, as May (2006) puts it, ambiguous and open to interpretation." May (2006) also point out that Good to Great suffers from confirmation bias: the author has some vague ideas about good companies and great companies and because the data is his own to manipulate, he can confirm his biases and expectations through what appear to be empirical data. Collins does refute the accusation of confirmation bias by claiming that when he and the team of researchers set out to discover the good to great parameters, they wanted to start from scratch rather than building on Built to Last.

Taken at face value, though, and read not as an example of solid scholarship but as self-help guru-style popular nonfiction, Good to Great has a certain degree of internal validity. The parameters of good to great companies are evidence in those that are profiled, even if the book is now out of date regarding the greatness of Fannie Mae and Circuit City. However, the author does not mention whether it is possible to exhibit the seven principles of good to great companies and still not achieve greatness as Collins measures it. Interestingly, Collins found that strategic planning was not necessarily linked to good to great companies. This seems to contradict the fact that good to great companies are defined by their longevity and commitment to self-pacing via strategic resource management.

Change management seems to be an underlying current of Good to Great, although Collins does not express it as such. The core issue in good to great leaps is that there should be some defining transformation that propels the good company into greatness. There is no way to actually quantify this leap, but it comes from steady ongoing progress rather than sudden shocks. In fact, the chapter on "the flywheel and the doom loop" is about this concept exactly. Good to great companies have no miracle moment, no single lucky break or defining invention that revolutionizes the industry. Instead, good to great companies slowly but surely build momentum as a flywheel might, turning the wheel until flight becomes possible. Structured change programs and planned leaps are often counterproductive, claims Collins.

Level Five leadership is one of the cornerstone concepts of Good to Great. Some critics claim that Collins's concept of level five leadership is designed to make the reader feel good because nearly anyone can achieve it (May, 2006). Still, there are some truths in the concept of Level Five leadership, such as the importance of blending some degree of humility with ambition to succeed. There have certainly been great leaders who have suffered from too much hubris, and that is as true for politics as well as business. This is why Level Five leadership is only one of seven principles for organizational greatness. Not all Level Five leaders will lead a good company to greatness. Likewise, some arrogant leaders without a trace of humility may ensure at most a short-term success for an organization. Whether this is true or not based on empirical research remains to be seen.

External validity is in fact the greatest weakness of Good to Great. The book suffers from methodological weaknesses. There are no controls, in the sense that Collins cannot find companies that exhibit the principles outlined in the book but who have not yet made it to greatness. Collins claims that companies that are merely good but not great are ones that qualify as control groups. This excuse is fine for the trade book market, but not for the scholarly set.

Collins also fails to ask the question, why is it important to achieve the type of greatness that he defines? Why should any company care? What about companies who have short-term goals, and whose vision does not extend as long as some of the companies that Collins profiles? Many companies can be great for a short while, leave an indelible mark on the planet, and then fade away. Their contributions might be as worthy if not worthier than the contributions of a stalwart organization that has survived decades of market vicissitudes but which has no concrete contributions or merit.

Not all is lost in the mire of Collins' masturbatory research, though. One of the most compelling sections of the book is the Hedgehog Concept, which can be applied to both personal and professional greatness. The Hedgehog Concept suggests that good to great organizations know what they are good at and cultivate a single unifying idea. Simplicity is the key. It is better to make the best widgets on the planet than to diversify for the sake of diversification. Simplifying a complex world means focusing, and focusing depends on the ability to be honest and self-aware. On an organizational level, this means evaluating core strengths and weaknesses, performing self-analysis and SWOT analyses regularly to understand what passions are driving leadership, what the core talents of the organization are at a juncture in time, and finally, knowing what makes the most money. The bottom line is the measure of organizational success in the Collins model, so the latter aspect of the hedgehog concept comes across as being the most important.