These are
books and audio recordings I have found inspirational and helpful in the past
several years. There are Amazon.com links for those items available
through Amazon.com. Please let me know of your favorites and new
discoveries that are not listed.
Built to Last : Successful Habits of Visionary
Companies
by Jim Collins
Editorial Reviews
This analysis of what makes great companies great has been hailed everywhere as
an instant classic and one of the best business titles since In Search of
Excellence. The authors, James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, spent six years
in research, and they freely admit that their own preconceptions about business
success were devastated by their actual findings--along with the preconceptions
of virtually everyone else.
Built to Last identifies 18 "visionary" companies and sets out to determine
what's special about them. To get on the list, a company had to be world famous,
have a stellar brand image, and be at least 50 years old. We're talking about
companies that even a layperson knows to be, well, different: the Disneys, the
Wal-Marts, the Mercks.
Whatever the key to the success of these companies, the key to the success of
this book is that the authors don't waste time comparing them to business
failures. Instead, they use a control group of "successful-but-second-rank"
companies to highlight what's special about their 18 "visionary" picks. Thus
Disney is compared to Columbia Pictures, Ford to GM, Hewlett Packard to Texas
Instruments, and so on.
The core myth, according to the authors, is that visionary companies must start
with a great product and be pushed into the future by charismatic leaders. There
are examples of that pattern, they admit: Johnson & Johnson, for one. But there
are also just too many counterexamples--in fact, the majority of the "visionary"
companies, including giants like 3M, Sony, and TI, don't fit the model. They
were characterized by total lack of an initial business plan or key idea and by
remarkably self-effacing leaders. Collins and Porras are much more impressed
with something else they shared: an almost cult-like devotion to a "core
ideology" or identity, and active indoctrination of employees into
"ideologically commitment" to the company.
The comparison with the business "B"-team does tend to raise a significant
methodological problem: which companies are to be counted as "visionary" in the
first place? There's an air of circularity here, as if you achieve "visionary"
status by ... achieving visionary status. So many roads lead to Rome that the
book is less practical than it might appear. But that's exactly the point of an
eloquent chapter on 3M. This wildly successful company had no master plan,
little structure, and no prima donnas. Instead it had an atmosphere in which
bright people were both keen to see the company succeed and unafraid to "try a
lot of stuff and keep what works."
Janet McCallen
Having gotten worn out on Tom Peters and his praise of companies whose luster
had waned, I avoided Built to Last until after I'd finally read Jim
Collins' Good to Great, remembered previous references to Built to
Last, and decided it was probably worth a read. Was it ever! Collins'
and Porras' description of the core ideology and culture and its centrality to
success is a classic.
