Peters and Waterman's best seller, In Search of Excellence, proclaimed to determine which companies were truly great and what made them great. Collins' best-seller Good to Great made the same claims. Both authors did a tremendous amount of research and created some interesting and useful observations. But the arguments in both cases had a fatal flaw, almost exactly the same flaw in each case.
Collins presented a mea culpa concerning Good to Great in his successor book How the Mighty Fall, stating that--although many of the great companies he described in Good to Great had subsequently failed--his research and findings were still valid. He can't help it if they adopted new attitudes and techniques!!! Amazing how those wonderful companies just shifted gears. Maybe there was a flaw in his findings. Maybe one altared company, Fannie Mae, whose financial performance was pinned on a foundation of providing loans to people who couldn't pay and whose charter was principally supported by tens of millions of dollars lobbying congress for special rules, wasn't so great even at the time. hmmm.
Time to fess up, Peters and Waterman and Collins. You have never run companies; your research is based on after-the-fact findings; you don't run controlled experiments; you haven't found a way to recognize the true facets of success.
To the seasoned and savvy manager, there is no one set of success factors. Each business has unique factors in its markets, its environment, its culture. The adept manager recognized those unique factors and tailors an approach to optimize performance-- recognizing the uniqueness of the situation at hand.
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