"[3] Publishers Weekly called it "worthwhile", although "many of Collins' perspectives on running a business are amazingly simple and commonsense".

Holt and Cameron state the book provides a "generic business recipe" that ignores "particular strategic opportunities and challenges.

"[7] Steven D. Levitt noted that some of the companies selected as "great" have since gotten into serious trouble, such as Circuit City and Fannie Mae, while only Nucor had "dramatically outperformed the stock market" and "Abbott Labs and Wells Fargo have done okay".

First, heavy reliance on magazine articles as research introduce sources littered with halo effects.

Finally, he notes the presence of the Organizational Physics delusion in that Collins does not carefully avoid confusing correlation with causation.