Out of Mediocrity

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, is important. Every one of his great organizations is led by a devoted, competent leader who combines personal humility with professional will. Collins calls this person a “Level 5 leader.”

Level 5 leaders are not the stereotypical, charismatic drivers who set vision and chart the course. Rather, “they first got the right people on the bus and then figured out where to drive it.” Getting the right people on the team proved more important than planning the right strategy.

Collins also discovered that great organizations are distinguished by:

Confronting the brutal facts while maintaining faith and hope.
A culture of disciplined thought and action.
Using technology to accelerate growth, but not as the primary means of igniting transformation.
Doing the proper things over and over to build momentum.

Lastly, Collins found that good-to-great organizations developed a combination of finding what they’re the best at, what their passion is, and what drives their economy—a confluence he calls the “Hedgehog Concept.”

Some pastors who read Good to Great will be challenged by Collins’s suggestion that we avoid leading by charisma. Others will be prompted to create a Hedgehog Concept of their own. Still others will be led to question what role the Holy Spirit and revival have in igniting new life within the church.

Good to Great is a business book, and some may find the research and corporate name dropping a hindrance. But chapters one and two alone are worth taking a “power lunch” to read what these great businesses have to teach churches that would be great.

Alan Nelson,pastor Scottsdale Family ChurchScottsdale, Arizona