Good to Great review: is Jim Collins' classic still worth reading?

Good to Great is one of the most widely read management books ever published, with sales reported at around four million copies. Jim Collins set out to answer a single question: can a good company become a great one, and if so, how? Twenty-five years later, this Good to Great review asks whether the answer still holds up.

We base this review on the book itself as described by the author and publisher, Collins' own published articles on the research, and the substantial body of criticism from economists and management scholars. We summarise the main ideas, weigh the objections and suggest who will get the most from it.

The research behind Good to Great

Collins and his research team spent five years screening 1,435 established companies. To qualify as good-to-great, a company had to go from roughly average stock returns to cumulative returns at least three times the market over the following 15 years, independent of its industry. Only 11 made the cut.

The list included Abbott Laboratories, Circuit City, Fannie Mae, Gillette, Kimberly-Clark, Kroger, Nucor, Philip Morris, Pitney Bowes, Walgreens and Wells Fargo. Each was paired with a comparison company in the same industry, such as Nucor with Bethlehem Steel and Walgreens with Eckerd, to find what the winners did differently.

Key concepts in Good to Great

The book organises its findings into a handful of ideas that have become part of everyday business language. They are easy to remember, which is a big reason for the book's lasting popularity.

Collins also argues against common change myths. In his account, the great companies did not rely on dramatic launch events, manufactured crises, big acquisitions or technology alone. Change built up gradually until results became visible from the outside.

• Level 5 Leadership: leaders who combine personal humility with intense professional will
• First Who, Then What: get the right people on the bus before deciding where to drive it
• Confront the Brutal Facts: keep faith in success while facing reality, the Stockdale Paradox
• The Hedgehog Concept: focus on what you can be best at, what drives your economics and what you are passionate about
• A Culture of Discipline: disciplined people, thought and action
• Technology Accelerators: technology speeds up momentum but does not create it
• The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: steady pushes build unstoppable momentum

What still works in 2026

The people-first message remains practical for any growing company. Hiring and keeping the right team before committing to a strategy is advice many founders learn the hard way. The Hedgehog Concept is a useful discipline for saying no to distractions, and the Flywheel captures how compounding effort works better than slogans do.

Collins has kept developing these ideas in later work, including a monograph on the flywheel and one showing how the concepts adapt to schools, hospitals and nonprofits. That suggests the framework travels well beyond big corporations.

Criticism: survivorship bias and the fate of the great companies

The most common objection is that several of the great companies did not stay great. Circuit City later collapsed and Fannie Mae ran into serious trouble during the financial crisis. Economist Steven Levitt argued that a portfolio of the 11 companies bought when the book came out would have underperformed the S&P 500, and that such studies look backwards rather than predicting the future.

Phil Rosenzweig, in The Halo Effect, criticised the heavy use of press articles as research material and warned that the method risks confusing correlation with causation. In response to such criticism, Collins is reported to have said the book never promised the companies would always be great, only that they had been great during the period studied.

Applying Good to Great in a small or mid-sized company

Although the research focused on large corporations, many of its lessons work at a smaller scale. Collins' later book BE 2.0, written for small and entrepreneurial companies, shows that he sees the same principles applying there too.

A practical way to start is to run a short workshop with your leadership team around a few questions drawn from the book.

• Do we have the right people in the key seats, and what do we do about gaps?
• What brutal facts are we avoiding right now?
• Where do our passion, our best capability and our economic driver overlap?
• Which steady, repeatable actions would build momentum like a flywheel?
• What should we stop doing because it falls outside our focus?

Who should read Good to Great?

It is well suited to new managers, team leads, founders of growing businesses and anyone who wants a shared vocabulary for leadership discussions. Readers looking for a data-proof formula for beating the stock market will be disappointed. The best approach is to treat the concepts as questions to ask about your own organisation.

Key specs

Author

Jim Collins

Publisher

HarperCollins (US)

First published

16 October 2001

Length

About 320 pages (first hardcover)

Research base

1,435 established companies screened; 11 good-to-great companies identified

Formats

Hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook

Genre

Management, corporate strategy

Alternatives to consider

• Built to Last: Collins' earlier study with Jerry Porras on companies that stay visionary across generations.
• Great by Choice: Collins and Morten Hansen on why some companies thrive in uncertainty.
• The Halo Effect: Phil Rosenzweig's sharp critique of popular management research, including Good to Great.

Frequently asked questions

Good to Great deserves its place on most lists of the best business books. Its concepts are clear, practical and easy to share with a team, and its paired-company research gives it more weight than typical leadership advice. The criticism is real, and the book is best read alongside a sceptical companion. As a framework for thinking about people, focus and momentum, it is still worth your time in 2026.

How we research: Reviews are based on the maker’s specifications, published independent tests and owner reports. Scores compare the product with others in its class.