“At their most ambitious, these books purport to elevate the study of excellence to a science, its nuggets culled from exhaustive research and refined by painstaking analysis. Jim Collins, coauthor of Built to Last and author of Good to Great, likens what he does to physics. Readers of his books, he writes, have their eyes opened to the ‘immutable laws of organized human performance.’ But a few consultants and business school professors have begun to argue that much of this literature is, in fact, useless.”