Jim Collins is not an intellectual. Good To Great reads like a textbook: Venn diagrams, flow charts, elementary school analogies to buses and forest creatures. There were no profound sentences or core-shaking ideas. The only time I became passionate while reading his book was when I complained to a friend about the absurdity of the Stockdale Paradox (NOT A PARADOX!). It may not be necessary for Jim Collins to write well in order to make his point, but his book is so full of images and quotes and analogies and data; one begins to lose interest in the point.

Collins has discovered a way for good organizations to become great. Excellent. However, after the list he gave of good organizations, why should I be inspired to become great? Coca-Cola is only a good company. Personally, Coca Cola seems to e doing just fine. If you asked me to choose between my organization being a Coca-Cola or a Walgreen’s, I could be persuaded either way. The fact that one of those companies is only good, while the other is great according to Mr. Collins does not mean much to me.

While on the topic of organizations, how well does Good To Great translate to schools? Throughout the book, there are statements that Collins makes which seem to be applicable to all organizations: the five levels of leaders were applicable not only to CEOs, but to dead presidents as well. However, there were other statements he made which made me stop and question how he pictured anyone other than a businessman putting his word’s into action. For example, the first of the three circles, or, What you can be the best in the world at (Ugh): “The good to great companies understood that doing what you are good at will only make you good; focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.”

Am I supposed to believe that JPS is better at something than any other district in the US and should therefore give up endeavors for anything else? Or, is it that Public Schooling as a whole is better than any other organization at education, and should therefore focus on that? Hopefully it is neither because both are useless and silly statements. The mere fact that this notion of focusing on what you can do best is part of process called The Hedgehog Concept, though, doesn’t discourage me from thinking that so many of this man’s statements are silly.

I hate to write this man and his research off as silly. I am sure that data in this book is beneficial and that certain CEOs have plaques hanging up of THE COUNCIL mechanism so as to remind everyone that questioning needs to happen in a clockwise motion. Unfortunately, I cannot take seriously a person who decides it is a wise move to convince people of the superiority of hedgehogs by writing, “What could be more simple than ? What could be simpler than the idea of the unconscious, organized into an id, ego, and superego? What could be more elegant than Adam Smith’s pin factory and ‘invisible hand’?”