Good to Great CD: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Other's Don't (Abridged)

Built to Last,the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how longterm sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning.

But what about companies that are not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? Are there those that convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? If so, what are the distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

Over five years, Jim Collins and his research team have analyzed the histories of 28 companies, discovering why some companies make the leap and others don't. The findings include:

• Level 5 Leadership: A surprising style, required for greatness.
• The Hedgehog Concept: Finding your three circles, to transcend the curse of competence.
• A Culture of Discipline: The alchemy of great results.
• Technology Accelerators: How good-to-great companies think differently about technology.
• The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Why those who do radical restructuring fail to make the leap.

Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained them. Some of the key concepts discerned in this study, comments Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people". Abridged. 5 CDs.

Destined to be the business publishing event of the year, or even the decade, this is the long awaited new book by the co-author of Built To Last. In it, Jim Collins shares his latest long-term research - and shows how even mediocre companies can become long-term world beaters.

Jim Collins has become a best-selling classic business author, with 590,000 copies sold to date, and has been translated into 17 languages.

Jim Collins is a student and teacher of enduring great companies — how they grow, how they attain superior performance, and how good companies can become great companies. Having invested over a decade of research into the topic, Jim has co-authored three books, including the classic Built to Last,a fixture on the Business Weekbestseller list for more than five years, generating over 70 printings and translations into 16 languages. His work has been featured in Fortune, The Economist, Business Week, USA Today, Industry Week, Inc., Harvard Business Reviewand Fast Company.

Driven by a relentless curiosity, Jim began his research and teaching career on the faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992. In 1995, he founded a management laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, where he now conducts multi-year research projects and works with executives from the private, public, and social sectors.

Jim has served as a teacher to senior executives and CEOs at corporations that include: Starbucks Coffee, Merck, Patagonia, American General, W.L. Gore, and hundreds more. He has also worked with the non-corporate sector such as the Leadership Network of Churches, Johns Hopkins Medical School, the Boys &Girls Clubs of America and The Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Non-Profit Management.

Jim invests a significant portion of his energy in large-scale research projects — often five or more years in duration — to develop fundamental insights and then translate those findings into books, articles and lectures. He uses his management laboratory to work directly with executives and to develop practical tools for applying the concepts that flow from his research.

In addition, Jim is an avid rock climber and has made free ascents of the West Face of El Capitan and the East Face of Washington Column in Yosemite Valley.