Where to Start with Jim Collins: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Jim Collins — whether to begin with Good to Great, Built to Last, or Great by Choice. A complete reading guide to the business author.
By Marcus Webb
Jim Collins (born 1958) is the American business researcher and author whose Built to Last (1994, co-authored with Jerry Porras) and Good to Great (2001) are among the bestselling business books ever published, with Good to Great alone selling over four million copies and appearing on most management school syllabuses. Collins’s method is empirical — he identifies companies with sustained exceptional performance and researches what distinguishes them from comparable companies — and his research teams have been extraordinarily influential in shaping how business leaders think about strategy, leadership, and organisational culture. He operates an independent management laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.
Where to Start: Good to Great (2001)
The essential Collins — and one of the most influential business books of the last twenty-five years. The starting question is deceptively simple: why do some companies make the leap from good performance to sustained greatness, while others with apparently similar resources remain merely good?
To answer this, Collins and his research team spent five years examining 1,435 Fortune 500 companies, identifying eleven that showed a specific pattern: fifteen or more years at or below market average, followed by a transition and then fifteen years at three times the market average. They then compared these eleven exhaustively against companies that had the same opportunities but did not make the transition.
The distinguishing factors they identified — Level 5 Leadership (the paradoxical combination of personal humility and professional will), the Flywheel (the slow build of momentum before takeoff), the Hedgehog Concept (doing one thing better than anyone in the world, sustainably), and the discipline of confronting brutal facts while maintaining faith — became the standard vocabulary of management thinking in the 2000s.
The limitations are real (several of the ‘great’ companies subsequently declined) but the frameworks remain useful for thinking about what sustained excellence requires.
Built to Last (1994)
Collins’s earlier study — visionary companies and what sustained them over decades. The companion piece to Good to Great; best read after the later book.
Reading Jim Collins
Begin with Good to Great — it is his most widely cited work and the best introduction to his research method and his concepts. Read Built to Last for his earlier study of enduring companies; the two books address related questions from different angles.
For the full Jim Collins bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Jim Collins author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Jim Collins?
Good to Great (2001) is the essential starting point — Collins's research-based study of eleven companies that made the transition from good performance to sustained greatness, identifying the common factors that distinguished them from comparison companies that remained merely good. One of the bestselling business books ever published; its concepts (Level 5 Leadership, the Hedgehog Concept, the Flywheel) have entered the standard vocabulary of management thinking.
What is Good to Great about?
Good to Great is based on a five-year research project examining 1,435 companies, identifying eleven that made the sustained leap from good to great performance and comparing them systematically to companies that did not. The distinguishing factors Collins identifies include Level 5 Leadership (leaders who are personally humble but professionally fierce), the 'First Who, Then What' principle (getting the right people on the bus before deciding direction), confronting the brutal facts of your situation without losing faith in your ability to prevail, and the Hedgehog Concept (doing one thing better than anyone in the world).
What is Built to Last about?
Built to Last (1994), co-authored with Jerry Porras, is Collins's earlier study — examining eighteen 'visionary companies' (HP, 3M, Disney, Boeing, etc.) that had sustained excellence over decades, and comparing them to good but less enduring competitors. The book argues that visionary companies are distinguished by adherence to core values and core purpose rather than brilliant strategies; that their cultures are simultaneously cult-like in internal cohesion and highly adaptive externally. Published before Good to Great but read after it by most readers.
Have Collins's findings held up?
Several of the companies Collins identified as exceptional in Good to Great subsequently declined or failed (Circuit City, Fannie Mae). Collins addressed this in later books (How the Mighty Fall, 2009) by studying why great companies fall — an implicit acknowledgment that greatness is not permanent. The concepts he identifies remain influential and useful as frameworks for thinking about organisational excellence, even if the specific case studies have not all stood the test of time.
