Good to Great

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't is a management book by Jim Collins, published in 2001. It investigates how certain companies move from being merely good to being truly great, and why most companies fail to make that transition. The book became a bestseller, selling around four million copies, and reached a readership well beyond the usual audience for business titles.

Collins's method is to identify eleven "great companies" and compare them with competitors in the same industries and with similar opportunities that did not achieve the sustained growth of the first group. He also examines six companies that failed to sustain their change toward greatness. To explain the differences, Collins draws on the "hedgehog concept," inspired by Isaiah Berlin's essay on an ancient Greek parable: the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Successful organizations, in his view, concentrate on what they can do better than anyone else in the world.

The book was praised by much of the business press and was counted among the most influential management titles of its time. It also drew sharp criticism. Some writers argued that it offers a generic recipe that ignores specific strategic circumstances, that several of the companies it celebrated later ran into serious trouble, and that its reasoning sometimes confuses correlation with causation, relying heavily on magazine sources prone to the halo effect and idealizing its success stories.