The central question posed by Jim Collins and his research team was this: How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?
To do this, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. After their transformations, these good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his team present the key determinants of greatness — why some companies make the leap and others don’t.