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You either die thinking Good to Great is a good management book, or you live long enough to learn it’s not.
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I am not an MBA, but I have read Good to Great, so let me just note one of the companies cited in it as being exceptional was Circuit City. You know, that famously great electronics store you can get in your car and go buy a television from right now, today.
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Almost all management books are bad because they focus one 1 hero’s journey cycle of a company. Follow one of your running example companies through *two* full death-resurrection cycles and I’ll take your lessons seriously. A principle that survives 2 corporate lives is a keeper
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A good diagnostic for finding practices worth copying from a successful company is to ask: “What’s stayed the same since the last peak?” Answers extra valuable if leader has changed because then you know it’s in org DNA, not Big Man dna.
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Lessons from companies that haven’t survived at least one death-resurrection are worse than useless. At the risk of making a tasteless caste-system joke, companies need to be twice-born before they learn anything at all.
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Drucker, Chandler, Lawrence and Lorsch, all still pretty good among the classics. Many have a few good enduring ideas. For eg Power of Habit I think has basic good idea. Certain to Win is good. Thriving on Chaos is very dated now, but still remember a few ideas from it.
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Is getting product market fit for a second time harder than the first time? I think probably yes, and so the solution is typically buy a few product market fit companies via M&A and hope to grow them. But that shouldn’t count for the second cycle proving a company is high quality
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