The book, Collins advised, could be done using the same research methods he employed when writing Good to Great.After receiving encouragement from two of the most respected voices in the field,McFarland was finally inspired enough to set out and discover for himself how a company moved from startup to full-blown success.
He wasn’t interested in the General Electrics,Dells or Wal-Marts of the business world
— those companies and others in their economic strata had been analyzed countless times.What McFarland wanted were real-life examples of the businesses that had broken through the entrepreneurial stage of development and,if they weren’t raking in
tens of billions of dollars annually, were at least successful on a large scale. In doing so,he finally found that book he had been looking for all those years — his own.
And even though he claims that The Breakthrough Company is not a recipe for creating successful companies, he still offers plenty of advice on how a company moves from one level of accomplishment to the next.