Good To Great By Jim Collins

Good To Great Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't By Jim Collins

This book is about how companies go from being good companies to companies that create long term sustained great performance. The book identifies eleven publicly traded companies from the Fortune 500 that went from barely beating the market to having continuous returns of at least twice the market for stockholders. I am not sure how this applies to libraries, but the book attempts to define a set of principles on making a company great.

The message in this book was easy to identify with. There are no complex strategies, flashy leadership secrets, or special financial techniques. This book is about how to inspire discipline, find a consistent simple purpose, create continuous incremental change, choose the right technologies, and bring very focused leadership on board.

One of the first things that Jim Collins writes is that it is impossible to implement any sustainable strategy without first bringing the right people on board. He also writes that it is as important to choose what not to do as what to do.

The book has a number of metaphors sprinkled throughout. One of them is the Stockdale Paradox: be brutally honest and at the same time know you will prevail. For discipline, there is the metaphor of rinsing your cottage to remove all the extra fat. This was done by a champion triathlete.

Most of the examples in this book are very concrete. Philip Morris introduced flip top boxes for cigarettes, Nucor introduced continuous slab casting, and Kroger was the first to experiment with scanners in supermarkets. These are all examples of introducing the right products and technology to gain market advantage.

My favorite metaphor in the book is the flywheel metaphor. Change happens not because of big fantasy initiatives, but because of continuous pressure. A flywheel speeds up because of continous sustained momentum. I like to think of the same idea with pushing an iceberg where it is very slow to move, but becomes very hard to stop once it is in motion.

The book contains no photographs. There are a few black and white charts that are easy to understand. Also, there is an index, bibliographic notes, and a detailed set of appendices explaining how the research on the companies being written about was done.

I read the companion monograph, Good to Great and the Social Sectors Why Business Thinking Is Not the Answer as well. The monograph is very short, 35 pages and distills the essence of the larger book focusing on nonprofits and government agencies. A few of the organizations covered are the New York Police Department, the Girl Scouts, and the Cleveland Orchestra. There are a number of metrics on how to measure greatness in social sector companies. This is worth reading before you read the larger book.

Daily Thougts 5/2/2099

Poster by John Cecily Clay 1905

Daily Thoughts 5/2/2009

I walked up to my local library. It is very nice outside. It was refreshing. I picked up a manga by Hideo Azuma called Disappearance Diary. It is about a manga artist who has a habit of wandering off from his family, becoming alcoholic, becoming homeless, and acting a bit wild. The manga won the Grand Prize at the 9th Japan Media Arts Festival in 2005. It reminds me a bit of On the Road in a way and other accounts of wandering artists. I finished reading it tonight and will write a review tomorrow.

I also finished reading Good To Great by Jim Collins. This is a very interesting book. It will take me a while to think through what it says. There are a lot of implications about what it is saying that are quite relevant to what I am doing. I also finished reading the companion monograph, Good to Great and the Social Sectors

Steven Barnes has a mass market paperback of Great Sky Woman out. The book is about a prehistoric tribe in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. He is an African American writer of science fiction. He incorporates many historical motifs in his novels. Steven Barnes was nominated for the Hugo award for Novelette, The Locusts which he cowrote with Larry Niven. The sequel, Shadow Valley is coming out on May 5, 2009.

I finished watching Sidewalk Stories on dvd by Charles Lane. Charles Lane lent it to me to watch. I found it rather interesting. He acted, produced, and directed in this film. It is a silent black and white film set in New York city. The musical score is what makes the film exceptional. It takes the place of the dialogue. He also lent me another film, True Identity which is a comedy. He both acts in and produces this film.

Web Bits

Thomas Nelson has a book review program for bloggers. They give a free book to people who review their books. http://brb.thomasnelson.com/

Daily Thoughts 4/30/2009

Elisabeth Maria Anna Jerichau-Baumann, 1855 (right: Jacob Grimm; left: Wilhelm Grimm)

Daily Thoughts 4/30/2009

Today was another intensely busy day. The new slat walls were put up yesterday. We shifted over most of the new books to the new display area. It looks a lot better than the old place where we kept the new books.

I also worked on a few other minor projects; putting together a list of graphic novels for a bookmark, filing some looseleafs, arranging for a program, and attending a meeting. I had a chance to read the latest Publishers Weekly, but not much else.

I read some more of Good to Great on the train. The message is fairly clear; choose great people before you plan anything, be humble, face your problems, and focus on discipline.

City, Pond, Water

Cities are imagined

like pools of water

around a quiet spring

They grow rapidly

along the river edge

spreading like new grass

Skyscrapers are weeds

blotting the horizon

rising in the sun

Houses are mushrooms

clumped close together

around paved street roots.

Cities grow organically

to fill empty spaces

consuming the wild world

Daily Thoughts 4/29/09

Reading Lady. Kamisaka, Sekka -- Artist Woodcuts From:Momoyogusa = Flowers of a Hundred Generations. c1909

Daily Thoughts 4/29/09

Today is rather interesting. We had a morning meeting discussing the many things which are currently happening. We are doing a lot with getting the library collection more organized. I spent a considerable amount of time making sure the law collection was being covered properly today.

We have a reggae poet doing a workshop right now. I stopped in for a minute to check on things. He was talking about how to do free writing. He has a cd of his poetry which he is giving to participants. There is also a class visiting from the local baptist church who are working on a project on different countries around the world. The final thing which is happening is a city Green Committee which is meeting for the first time in the community room. We are making a concerted effort to increase community involvement in the library. The reggae poet did very well. He wants to come back again to do another workshop. He gave two of his spoken word cds to the library.

I started working on a bookmark for graphic novels. It has a nice short selection of what I think people might like to read. I might also do one for writing as well.

On the train home, I started reading Good To Great Why Some Companies Make The Leap... And Others Don't by Jim Collins. There is also an accompanying monograph called Good To Great And The Social Sectors Why Business Thinking Is Not The Answer by Jim Collins. The monograph is quite short, only 35 pages of text.