Most companies are conceived with great expectations.Yet few of them manage to maintain outstanding success in the long run. Exactly what are the factors that lead to such success? Are they at work within Seagate? A 21-person research team recently spent five years analyzing the common traits of outstanding companies in order to discern those qualities. Their discoveries can be read in Good to Great, Jim Collins’ critically acclaimed book. IN magazine spoke with the best-selling author about his findings and how they relate to Seagate’s quest for excellence.

Good to Great began as a follow-up to Collins’ 1997 book Built to Last. That book made a media splash with its examination of how companies can design themselves for greatness from the very beginning. Five years later,with Built to Last still a bestselling business book in the U.S., Collins asked himself the question: Can a longstanding good — but unremarkable — company evolve into a great company? To answer his own question, Collins formed a research team and got to work. They read and coded 6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and created 384 megabytes of computer data. They determined that the answer to his question was “yes.”Good to Great explains how.

The first phase of research was to identify companies that had driven and maintained significant improvement in stock performance over time. The criteria was particularly demanding; their stock price growth had to hover around market averages for 15 years, and then, after a transition point, demonstrate cumulative returns of at least three times the market average over the next 15 years. (Since this requires a company to have been around at least 30 years, most technology companies weren’t considered for the study.) Out of 1,435 companies examined, the 11 that made the cut were surprisingly unglamorous: Abbott Laboratories, Circuit City, Fannie Mae, Gillette, Kimberly-Clark, Kroger,Nucor, Philip Morris, Pitney Bowes,Walgreens and Wells Fargo.

Collins explains that when examining these companies, he and his research staff identified common output variables. In addition to stock performance, did they perform well with respect to peers and other companies in the top percentage of performers? Did they have a unique impact, offering not only valuable product, but irreplaceable traits such as customer service, reliability, quality, time-to-market and innovation? Were they resilient, demonstrating the ability to persevere through tough times and emerge stronger, faster and better?

Does any of this sound familiar? Collins’ findings affirm much of what Seagate is doing right. “When it comes to action,we talk about being a disciplinarian,” he says. “This is not ruling through fear or with an iron fist. Rather, it’s building better discipline and processes.”Once the right processes are built, they offer the freedom to maintain creative self-discipline, says Collins.

Seagate’s process-driven initiatives are clearly in line with this concept.While programs such as Six Sigma and Lean Masters provide the tools and processes, their success lies in Seagate’s company-wide shift toward embracing efficiency. Collins and his team found that at the heart of the truly great companies was a corporate culture that rigorously found and promoted disciplined people to think and act in a disciplined manner.

They ultimately identified six key elements shared by the 11 great companies studied. One of them was leadership. “But the type of leadership is different,” Collins says. “Leaders are humble and worthy.Good leaders want to make the company great, independent of their leadership.”

Also, Collins identified an unusual concept called the “Hedgehog” strategy from the fable, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” by Isaiah Berlin. The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows only one big thing, and maintains total focus on it. This sharp focus on the essential serves as a symbol for Collins’ concept of a good leader, who knows how to stick with what the company does best. The focus has to be something the company can do better than anyone else, something capable of being its revenue engine and something employees and managers feel passionate about.

“Being in the disc drive industry can be a daunting task,”Collins says. “But if companies in far less attractive industries can succeed at being great, then Seagate can definitely do it with disc drives.”