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In Good to Great, Jim Collins talks about how he was surprised to discover the opposite of the typical, gregarious CEO. He found that CEOs building great compa

by smalter 14y ago

In Good to Great, Jim Collins talks about how he was surprised to discover the opposite of the typical, gregarious CEO. He found that CEOs building great companies that last were quiet, modest, and humble and attributed company success to others rather than drawing attention to him/herself. A model for that for me is Tony Hsieh. He's a quiet, thoughtful guy, and he's always talking about luck and attributing Zappos's success to the company's values, not his own genius.

SatvikBeri 14y ago
I wouldn't trust Good to Great. Almost all the predictions it made turned out to be wrong. Contrast this to The Innovator's Dilemma, where most of the predictions the author made turned out to be correct. More detail from the Wikipedia Article[1]: "Steven D. Levitt describes how he was inspired to read the book by the "phenomenon" it had become, and noted that many of the companies selected as "great" had since got into serious troubles, such as Circuit City, while only Nucor had "dramatically outperformed the stock market" and "Abbott Labs and Wells Fargo have done okay". Overall, investing in the portfolio of those 11 companies in 2001 would result in actually underperforming the S&P 500[4] Levitt concluded that books like this are "mostly backward-looking" and can't offer a guide for the future.[5]" [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_great http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_great
- dave_sullivan 14y ago
  I brought up Good to Great on HN once (re: this exact topic) and got a similar reply. Just because it failed to accurately predict the future doesn't mean there isn't any valuable information in there. It's certainly not on my top 10 list of best books ever, but it's not on my list of books I wish I'd never read either. It suggests that some of the best run companies are run by non-charismatic CEOs--I agree with that. Read it and make up your own mind. Or don't, but come off the whole "That book will poison your mind" thing.
  - saurik 14y ago
    To verify (I have not read the book, and am honestly asking so I can figure out whether I should, based on these comments bringing it up): does the book then have reasons to believe the things it says other than "these are successful companies [apparently false] so let's see how they are run"?
    - dave_sullivan 14y ago
      Not really, because the whole book is premised on the idea that companies that have made this transition were able to do so because of the principals outlined in the book. However, keep in mind that these were all successful companies at one point--they did make that transition from "good" to "great". After, some of them made the transition from "great" to "bankrupt", but that's possibly beside the point. Some of the concepts in the book, like the flywheel--that what appears to be overnight success is actually the result of many small, incremental, largely unnoticed changes--is a good one. Other concepts, not so much. I read a lot of pop business books in college, and I really liked this one. But they're all mental masturbation more or less, so ymmv.

by smalter 14y ago

SatvikBeri 14y ago

I wouldn't trust Good to Great. Almost all the predictions it made turned out to be wrong. Contrast this to The Innovator's Dilemma, where most of the predictions the author made turned out to be correct. More detail from the Wikipedia Article[1]: "Steven D. Levitt describes how he was inspired to read the book by the "phenomenon" it had become, and noted that many of the companies selected as "great" had since got into serious troubles, such as Circuit City, while only Nucor had "dramatically outperformed the stock market" and "Abbott Labs and Wells Fargo have done okay". Overall, investing in the portfolio of those 11 companies in 2001 would result in actually underperforming the S&P 500[4] Levitt concluded that books like this are "mostly backward-looking" and can't offer a guide for the future.[5]" [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_great http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_great

dave_sullivan 14y ago
I brought up Good to Great on HN once (re: this exact topic) and got a similar reply. Just because it failed to accurately predict the future doesn't mean there isn't any valuable information in there. It's certainly not on my top 10 list of best books ever, but it's not on my list of books I wish I'd never read either. It suggests that some of the best run companies are run by non-charismatic CEOs--I agree with that. Read it and make up your own mind. Or don't, but come off the whole "That book will poison your mind" thing.
- saurik 14y ago
  To verify (I have not read the book, and am honestly asking so I can figure out whether I should, based on these comments bringing it up): does the book then have reasons to believe the things it says other than "these are successful companies [apparently false] so let's see how they are run"?
  - dave_sullivan 14y ago
    Not really, because the whole book is premised on the idea that companies that have made this transition were able to do so because of the principals outlined in the book. However, keep in mind that these were all successful companies at one point--they did make that transition from "good" to "great". After, some of them made the transition from "great" to "bankrupt", but that's possibly beside the point. Some of the concepts in the book, like the flywheel--that what appears to be overnight success is actually the result of many small, incremental, largely unnoticed changes--is a good one. Other concepts, not so much. I read a lot of pop business books in college, and I really liked this one. But they're all mental masturbation more or less, so ymmv.