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“Good to Great” companies can fail, too
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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Yesterday’s bankruptcy filing by Circuit City Stores was the second black mark this year for the list of companies singled out by Jim Collins in his 2001 book, “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap, and Others Don’t.” The first was the failure — and government bailout — of giant mortgage company Fannie Mae.

In the book, Collins featured 11 companies that he thought had made the leap to greatness. “Good to Great” became one of the best-selling management books of all time, but it certainly doesn’t work as an investment primer. One company on the original list, Gillette, was acquired in 2005, having nearly doubled in price since the book was released. The others, though, haven’t done so well in the stock market. Bloomberg, in its Chart of the Day feature, calculates that for the past five years, the 10 remaining “Good to Great” stocks have lost about 45 percent of their value, compared with a loss of roughly 18 percent in the Standard & Poor’s 500.

Surprisingly, despite the two failures, the “Good to Great” list is actually beating the S&P 500 this year. Two of Collins’ favorites, Kroger and Abbott Laboratories, are among the rare stocks to actually register slight year-to-date gains as of this afternoon. and Wells Fargo is only down 3 percent. The 10 stocks’ average loss is 35 percent, vs. a 38 percent decline in the S&P 500. Paul Kedrosky ran some similar numbers recently at Seeking Alpha, although for some reason he left Altria out of his calculations.

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  1. JL Sell  November 11, 2008 at 5:25 UTC

    Way back, when I read Jim Collins “Little red book”, I was somewhat skeptical.
    Still, however, the ideas are sound. Start with a good base, build with loyalty, promote from within. Teach successor executives all of your tricks and reward them well to help insure they will stay on after the person at the top moves on.

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