Good to Great and Social Sectors: a Monograph to Accompany Good to Great

The Innovation Journal: The Public Sector Innovation Journal, Volume 13(1), 2008, Article 12.

Book Review

Collins, J.

Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A monograph to accompany Good to Great (why business thinking is not the answer).

Boulder, Colorado: author, 2005.

Reviewed by Raymond A. Lemay

This 35-page self-published monograph goes over the important lessons in Collins’ earlier publication, Good to Great, and attempts to apply them to the social (human service) sectors. Its beginning premise is that social services should not adopt the business model. “Most businesses – like most of anything else in life – fall somewhere between mediocre and good. Few are great… So, then, why would we want to import the practices of mediocrity into the social sectors?” (p. 1).

The monograph, easily available through Chapters or Amazon, should be read as a concluding chapter to Collins original Good to Great book (Collins, 2001), that has been a remarkable best seller. The original book is the result of a very ambitious research project. The twenty-one members of Jim Collins’ research team in Bolder Colorado, reviewed a huge amount of financial data and other documentation for 1, 435 companies that appeared in the 1965, 1975, 1985 and 1995 listings of the Fortune 500. The criteria for selecting the good-to-great companies were strict.

“The company shows a pattern of “good” performance punctuated by a transition point, after which it shifts to “great” performance. We define “great” performance as a cumulative total stock return of at least 3 times the general market for the period from the point of transition through fifteen years (T + 15). We define “good” performance as a cumulative total stock return no better than 1,25 times the general stock market for the fifteen years prior to the point of transition. Additionally, the ratio of the cumulative stock return for the fifteen years after the point of transition divided by the ratio of the cumulative stock return...