Ironic: several of the companies featured in Jim Collins’ business blockbuster book Good to Great have tanked. Steven Levitt has a good post on this, From Good to Great to Below Average, on Freakonomics.
Ironically, I began reading the book on the very same day that one of the eleven “good to great” companies, Fannie Mae, made the headlines of the business pages. It looks like Fannie Mae is going to need to be bailed out by the federal government. If you had bought Fannie Mae stock around the time Good to Great was published, you would have lost over 80 percent of your initial investment.
Another one of the “good to great” companies is Circuit City. You would have lost your shirt investing in Circuit City as well, which is also down 80 percent or more. Best Buy has cleaned Circuit City’s clock for the last seven or eight years.
Nine of the eleven companies remain more or less intact. Of these, Nucor is the only one that has dramatically outperformed the stock market since the book came out. Abbott Labs and Wells Fargo have done okay. Overall, a portfolio of the “good to great” companies looks like it would have underperformed the S&P 500.
He adds that the same is true of the Tom Peters book on In Search of Excellence, which was a big deal a few years ago, presenting supposed lessons from America’s best-run companies; some of which have since crashed and burned.
Levitt concludes:
These business books are mostly backward-looking: what have companies done that has made them successful? The future is always hard to predict, and understanding the past is valuable; on the other hand, the implicit message of these business books is that the principles that these companies use not only have made them good in the past, but position them for continued success.
To the extent that this doesn’t actually turn out to be true, it calls into question the basic premise of these books, doesn’t it?
No argument there from me.
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