Out of Mediocrity
October 1, 2002
How is your church today: fine? or fantastic? Jim Collins shares the traits of 11 companies that discovered how to be better than good. Jim Collins's previous bestseller, Built to Last, showed how great companies built long-term success into their corporate fabric. It remains a good book for churches that desire to endure. But after the management researcher and Stanford scholar published Built to Last, a CEO told him that it was a useless book. "You studied companies that were great from the beginning," explained the CEO. "But what about companies that wake up partway through life and realize that they're good, but not great?" Collins began a five-year quest to find corporations that not only fit the CEO's description, but had also discovered ways to become great companies. How can an organization change from being okay to outstanding? Collins reviewed thousands of companies, looking for those that made the leap from good to great. He found eleven corporations (Walgreen's, Circuit City, Wells Fargo, and others) that fit his parameters for greatness and focused the remainder of the study on what made them change. For churches, according to Collins's model, studying Willow Creek and Saddleback may not provide answers, because those churches developed greatness from the beginning. Rather, Collins's study would be similar to examining churches that had been average for years, but then experienced a dramatic and enduring leap. According to Collins, the main reason there are so few great organizations is that the good ones settle for good. The primary enemy of great is not bad; it's good. Springboards to greatness
For church leaders Good to Great's second chapter, in which Collins describes his research team's discoveries about leadership, ...
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