To claim that Good to Great is flawed because the companies it profiles did not do well a decade later is wrong-headed. Nowhere in the book did Collins claim that the next 15 years were going to be great.

You can fault his methodology for its anecdotal nature, but he lays it out in the book and there is wisdom there. To dismiss it it out of hand is like claiming that Moneyball is a bad book because the Oakland A’s are having a losing season this year.

The point of the book is that there were a set of companies that had performed well over a 15 year period. He looked at that set and identified common attributes in their leadership. He made a case that those attributes are good things for a company. It’s very self-evident.

One of the major points of the book is that good CEOs (by his definition) is that they work consciously and in good faith on succession. I would argue that CEOs are the worst people to worry about succession. They are too close to the job to identify a successor, and because people will falsely attribute the wrong traits to their success. If my assertion is correct, then CEOs will fail at creating a succession plan, and the company’s success will revert to the mean.