Good to Great?

It is truly going to be a sad day for many Circuit City employees around the United States, as Circuit City has apparently decided to close 155 stores and withdraw from 12 markets.

Recently, I completed reading the book Good to Great by Jim Collins. Between the time I began reading it, and tonight, I have seen several of the companies profiled in this book do a complete 180. Companies, such as Fannie Mae, Circuit City, Kroger, etc. were highlighted in Jim's books. Now, I am not questioning the power of the analysis of Jim's team, and the facts do not lie about their performance. The point I am trying to make is that something happened to these companies that made them stop being great.

Are we in an age whereby large, monolithic organizations can simply steamroll the competition? The images of Walmart, Best Buy, and Bank of America spreading their business model across the landscape like a swarm of locusts. Landing where they wish, devouring all of the vegetation, and leaving permanent scarring across rural America.

I am not naive, and I understand that at this point, cost is a very important consideration for consumers. However, it makes me wonder how much these monolithic organizations are capturing, compiling, and ultimately leaving vulnerable for hackers and other mal-intended organizations.

To put it in perspective, consider the role that Microsoft plays in the world of personal computing. From my perspective -- and for the sake of this argument -- Microsoft is playing the same role that a Walmart or Best Buy is playing. However, ironically as it sounds, we do not hear the same pleas for choice as we do when we think of retail organizations. There is an entire community of people that choose the open source community for their computing needs. While the attractiveness of low cost is one factor, this is not the true motivation for many of the open source projects out there.

I could go on and on about this topic, the social impacts of the "locust swarm"; however, what I am truly searching for is a follow up book from Jim Collins that takes the same approach as his book Good to Great to perform a post mortem on the original 11 companies to see how the leadership and management has changed.