Good to Great

11 companies is a small sample size, they state that they only chose 11 companies because those are the ONLY companies that met their rigorous standards however to me that seems to undermine what “great” means. The author's definition of “great” seems to be very narrow and without doing research on other “great” companies (perhaps ones that are not publically traded) it's hard to say if these techniques are truly ones that all “Great” companies use or just these 11 that happened to perform well in the stock market for a period of 20 years. Also, I took this entire book with a grain of salt because a lot of these companies are either no longer “great” even by the author's definition, perhaps never were great by a slightly wider definition of “great”. Fannie Mae no longer exists, nor does Circut City. And Philip Morris? Sure perhaps they did great in the stock market but can one really say that a tobacco company is “great” by that many metrics?