Are there companies that, despite difficulties, transform long-term average or even worse performance into long-term great results? And if so, what are the universal determining characteristics that cause a company to change from good to great? Using rigorous tests, Jim Collins and his research team identified an elite group of companies that managed to start achieving great performances and maintain these great performances for at least fifteen years. How great were they? After their transformation, these companies generated cumulative stock returns that outperformed the general stock market by an average of seven times over fifteen years, which is twice the performance of the largest global companies, such as Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The research team compared the companies that became great with a carefully selected group of comparison companies that failed to transform from good to great. What was the difference? Why did one group succeed in becoming great while the other group remained merely good? The research team analyzed the history of all twenty-eight companies in the study for a full five years. After examining an enormous amount of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Jim Collins and his team discovered...
