Thank you SO much for writing this.

I was given Good to Great by a CEO to read between strategy sessions. I honestly thought it was a test to see whether we'd call it out for the vacuous bullshit it so clearly was or whether we'd fall in the trap and start talking about level 5 leadership.

Not so much Good to Great as middling, but underperforming, to doing rather better now for a little while, thank you. To so brazenly commit such amateurish logical errors (sampling on the dependent variable, confounding growth with greatness), shamelessly to grab at Berlin's famous parable in a feeble hope that some actual intellectual leadership might rub off only to make such a dog's breaksfast of interpreting it. And then to sell such platitudinous golden rules (sell non-perofrming assets, fire cousins who don't deliver, please) as the deepest management wisdom.

We shouldn't retire Good to Great, it should never have been published. Or, better, it should have been the ignominious publishing failure it so richly deserves to be.