The Difference Between Good and Great

Jim Collins wrote a best selling book, Good to Great. I highly recommend it.

Why do some companies have continuing, sustained growth in excess of those companies around them? What is it that makes them different? Is it charismatic leadership? Right place, right time? Unique product? This is the question that Jim Collins attempts to answer in Good to Great. He and a team of 20 researchers spent five years and more than 15,000 man-hours researching the question, Why Some Companies Make the Leap, Good to Great...and Others Don't.

They reviewed thousands of books, articles, and annual reports; conducted financial analyses on records that totaled 980 years of combined business records. They interviewed 84 senior executives and board members, scrutinized the personal and professional records of 56 of the CEO's, and researched the executive compensation plans.

I recently experienced my own epiphany about what differentiates a good laboratory and a great laboratory. And despite what you may think, it’s not about the artistry, or the anatomy, or the 500 other matrices by which you might choose to compare yourself against your competitors. It’s about the relationships you have with the entire dental community. That includes your competitors, your customers, your colleagues, your vendors, your friends and your employees.

There are a number of publicly traded companies in the dental industry whom affect us every day. DENTSPLY (XRAY), National Dentex (NADX), Henry Schein (HSIC) etc,

But the ironic thing is, the single, most powerful entity that honestly has perhaps the greatest influence on our whole industry is a privately owned business, that started from a one-man operation just more than 30 years ago, yet today can change the direction of dental technology in a matter of weeks or months. They are NADL members and advocates: Glidewell Laboratories, CDL. They are no longer just a dental laboratory, they have become a major dental manufacturer, and have helped bring dental products to the market that one might argue even help their competitors become more competitive against themselves!

That is what takes a company from good to great. And in spite of their size and position, they still treat their smallest customer like their biggest, and competitors as customers in waiting. I’ll share an example:

A few days ago, we had one of our zirconia furnaces melt down. It had been overloaded with units and running 24/7 for so long that it finally gave out. My maintenance guy went down to Glidewell Laboratories and their R&D folks spent the time to show him how to replace the bad parts, and even sold us what we needed so that we could get back up and going the same day.

We got a couple more days service out of it, and it went down again. By this time, I had the manufacturers service people on the case, but I had a couple hundred units backed up. I called over there and told them of my plight and they offered to loan us a furnace to get us through this period. They even ran it overnight on a purge cycle and had it ready for us to pick up first thing the following morning.

Jim, Mike, Wolfgang and Cori just went above and beyond the call of duty to help out a fellow laboratory owner, and I'm deeply grateful to them for doing so. I've said it before, and I'll say it again...they are a class act, and frankly, it's that kind of attitude and cooperation that separates good from great, and they are the greatest laboratory in the world from a lot of perspectives.

It never ceases to amaze me at the quality of the people at Glidewell Laboratories. I have never once called there for something, and not had the person, or people jump through hoops to help me out, whether it was a case I was sending them, or even checking the employment history of an applicant.

If you want your laboratory to grow from good to great, you can learn a lot from watching the best there ever was and try to emulate what they do. Not their advertising, or their pricing or what have you, but building a corporate culture that is unbeatable.

Yet in spite of trying myself for the last 25 years, I just can’t seem to get the formula just right to get me there. Obviously Glidewell Laboratories has found the magic formula, but I suspect the secret ingredients that none of us will ever find, is James R. Glidewell, CDT, himself. But he certainly has surrounded himself with the best in the business, and that is what separates good from great.