The Entrepreneur’s Library: Good to Great
If you go onto just about any Accelerator or other kind of business start-up system, you’ll likely receive an extensive reading list. At CivTech we take a different approach - we don’t encourage participants in our programme to dive into many business books. This is because in our experience many of these fall short of the wisdom they claim to offer. Often, they simply rehash old ideas, pad them out with unnecessary content, or present old concepts in a new guise.
That said, there are a few books we hold in high regard. These are ones that have either stood the test of time, provide genuine clarity, or inspire innovative and forward-thinking ideas. These are the ones we recommend.
Over the coming months, we’ll be speaking with members of the CivTech team to get their book recommendations and the reasons behind them. And sometimes, the suggestions may not even fall into the traditional 'business book' category, but rather, they could be something that left a lasting impact and might be worth adding to your reading list.
Kicking things off is Mark Elliott, who heads up the CivTech Division…
Image: Mark Elliott, Divisional Head, CivTech
What is your book recommendation?
Good to Great, by Jim Collins. It’s a management book that describes how companies transition from being good companies to great companies, and how most companies fail to make the transition.
The lessons translated into a number of key ideas: great leadership; getting the right people on board and then setting course [not the other way around]; honestly dealing with the facts, even if they’re brutal; maintaining unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties; a clear understanding of what you are passionate about; developing a ‘a culture of discipline’; and using technology to accelerate progress.
The book was an instant bestseller, going far beyond the traditional audience of business books, and was cited by many people including several members of The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council as “the best management book they've read”. Certainly, it’s an opinion echoed by many people I work with and respect.
What aspects of the book did you find most appealing?
I came across the book not long after it was published, when I was CEO of DigitalCity Business in the North-East of England. What really impressed me about it was that it was a truly accessible, thoroughly researched, and genuinely insightful, and as about as far from the regurgitation-heavily padded-baldly written dross as it was possible to get. The lessons are amazingly simple and commonsense, though not always well understood, and sometimes apparently counter-intuitive.
As the CEO of DigitalCity at the time, how does this book relate to the work you were doing there?
The companies in Good to Great are just about as far as it was possible to get from what we were doing at DigitalCity Business. First of all we weren’t listed: we were a public sector funded economic regeneration programme focused on the digital and creative industries. We weren’t exactly Wall Street centred either, being set up in the poorest ward of the poorest area of the poorest region in England. And being in the very early years of the programme, we weren’t outperforming anyone over fifteen years. But we were outperforming other regeneration projects, and we came to realise we had in play perhaps five of the seven characteristics the book talks about. And one of our key mantras to the companies we were supporting was that you could be day one and starting in your bedroom, or your garage, or anywhere for that matter – and you could still be world class. So the question formed: did the findings in Good to Great apply to public sector projects, and indeed to the companies we were supporting, almost all of them being start-up and early-stage businesses, and all SMEs?
And like you do, I contacted Jim Collins, asking him. Quite to my surprise, he came back: they’d never considered this – but they would. And true to his word, he put his team onto it. A few weeks later, I got a second email: yes, the findings applied to projects and small companies.
We worked hard to integrate everything covered by Good to Great into the DigitalCity approach. And in the eleven years I was there, and probably seven or eight years of the book’s influence, we really delivered. We took what had been a ‘troubled paper exercise’ with ‘six months to live’ when I arrived to being called ‘one of the most successful projects we have’ by ERDF in Brussels, supporting a cluster of maybe just a dozen companies in 2003 to one of over 400 thriving businesses in 2014, going from 395th out of 400 areas in England in terms of high-growth potential companies per capita in 2003 to 4th in 2011, being rated by Ekos as the only digital hot spot [judged against national averages] north of Birmingham, and regarded as an ‘investment hotspot’.
Image: The book 'Good to Great' by Jim Collins
Lastly, what advice would you give to someone who is interested in reading Good to Great? Any final thoughts?
Truth is, you have to be careful with correlation and causation. I’m not saying adoption of the lessons from Good to Great was the single reason we were successful but it was important, along with a thoroughly worked-out approach [based on experience rather than ‘economic development theory’], a brilliant team, sheer determination, and a relentless and ruthless focus on delivery.
At CivTech, as best we can, we’ve integrated the lessons. And again, I’d say they’re pretty key to the momentum we’ve developed. So much so that I’m convinced the book’s insights could be applied to great effect in the public sector, in every organisation, at every level.
Of course, there was criticism of the book and of Collins himself, both at the time of publication and afterwards. But there always is, and the truth is some of the companies have done rather less than well since the study was completed. But looking at them, I realised that they’d started to falter, and in some cases fail completely, because they had strayed from what had made them great in the first place.
And this only reinforced my view: the findings, the lessons, still hold. Only today I read a quote from Pep Guardiola: When we win the game model seems good and is not questioned. But bear in mind, we won’t always win. Then doubts will come. That is the moment when we will have to trust the model more than ever because the temptation to move away from it will be very strong. How’s that from, in my opinion, the greatest soccer coach ever for a riff on ‘maintaining unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties’?
Yes, some need of the content in the book needs updating, but then everything does. And nothing it sets out is invalid, and we’re applying everything the book talks about at CivTech. Or perhaps I should better say almost all of them: I’m simply not prepared to say whether Level 5 Leadership is part of our make-up…
You’ll have to ask the team that!