Climbing to Greatness with Jim Collins

Most business books start by asserting that some new precept or technique will lead to success. They then look for examples to prove it. In Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don't, the management scholar Jim Collins started from the opposite direction: He studied only companies whose cumulative stock returns over time showed that they had reliably gone from 15 years or more of nondescript performance to 15 years or more of performance that out-paced the general market by a factor of three or more, and where the leap was not due to the general industry trend. Of the 1,435 companies that appeared on the Fortune 500 list from 1965 to 1995, Mr. Collins found only 11 that met the criterion. Here's why.