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.
Why Good to Great Is the Ideal First Book
For a reader new to Jim Collins, Good to Great is the ideal first book because it is his most influential and widely read work and the fullest expression of his distinctive approach, the rigorous, research-based investigation of what makes companies achieve enduring greatness. The book that made his name, Good to Great presents the findings of an extensive research project into how good companies become great ones, distilling years of analysis into a set of memorable and influential principles. As an entry point, it is ideal because it lays out Collins’s central findings clearly and compellingly, grounded in rigorous research and presented through memorable concepts that have entered the language of business. It welcomes the newcomer with its research-based authority, its clear principles, and its practical relevance to anyone interested in building great organizations. It is his best-known book and the one that best represents his approach, the combination of rigorous research with accessible, principle-driven presentation, so that the new reader encounters Collins at his most characteristic and influential. For the newcomer, then, Good to Great is the natural and ideal starting point, the influential book that distills rigorous research into the principles of enduring greatness.
What to Expect as a New Reader
As a new reader, you can expect Good to Great to be a rigorous, research-based business book, distilling extensive analysis into clear and memorable principles for building enduring greatness. You can expect a research-based approach, for Collins grounds his conclusions in an extensive study of companies that made the leap from good to great, lending his findings authority and credibility. You can expect memorable concepts and principles, for Collins is skilled at distilling his research into clear, vivid ideas that have become influential in the business world. You can expect a focus on what distinguishes truly great, enduring companies from merely good ones, and on the leadership, discipline, and principles that drive lasting greatness. You can expect an accessible and engaging presentation that makes rigorous research approachable and applicable. Expect, in short, a rigorous, research-based exploration of what makes companies achieve enduring greatness, presented through clear and memorable principles, an authoritative and influential introduction to Collins’s approach to building great organizations.
Going Deeper After Your First Book
Once Good to Great has introduced you to Collins’s research-based approach, the reader who wishes to go deeper can explore his other work, which continues his rigorous investigation of what makes great companies endure, builds on the findings of Good to Great, and addresses related questions of greatness, decline, and lasting success. His other books, including his earlier study of enduringly great companies and his later work on decline and on thriving amid uncertainty, extend his research-based investigation of organizational greatness. Reading these after Good to Great deepens your engagement with Collins’s distinctive approach, the rigorous research and the memorable principles applied to the questions of what makes companies great, what makes them endure, and what makes them fail. His characteristic method runs through his work, and the reader who has found Good to Great valuable will find the same rigor and insight in his other books. Building your reading journey through Collins’s work is a matter of following his research-based investigation of organizational greatness across his books. The reader who begins with Good to Great and continues through his work will find a consistently rigorous and influential guide to building great and enduring organizations.
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.
