Good to great

Good is the enemy of Great. We often fail to take advantage of excellence because we are committed to creating good things instead of great things. There are not many great schools because there are many good schools. We don't have a great government mainly because we have a good one. Few people get to lead great lives because it is much easier to focus on a good life. The same is true for companies. To produce the results presented in this book, the author has studied companies that have made the leap from good results to great results, and have maintained them for at least fifteen years. They have been compared to companies that have not managed to achieve this leap, or have been unable to maintain it. The book shows the set of practices that each company can adopt to become great. Companies operating in all types of markets were included in the study; those which performed at least three times better than competitors in the same market segment (so, for example, if the entire automotive market had increased uniformly, companies in this industry would not have been taken into account), and which have maintained these results for at least fifteen years.

At this point they did not look at what the companies had in common but at what distinguished them from their competitors (called control companies) that continued to be good but not excellent. They built a team of researchers that read thousands of scientific articles and compared different types of data. The explanations and ideas in this book come directly from that data. These practices were represented graphically by a wheel with the six main factors that enabled a company to make the leap to being great and to then break down all barriers to their success. The reason that they chose to use a wheel is simple: carrying out the six processes is not enough to become great, they have to be continually repeated over time.