Book of the Week: Built to Last

04 Nov 2014

I read Jim Collin’s prequel, Good to Great a few months ago. It was time to read the book he published first, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. Companies To determine what the successful habits are, Jim and team looked at what was different between the visionary company and the comparison company. Visionary | Comparison
—|—
3M | Norton
American Express | Wells Fargo
Boeing | McDonnell Douglas
Citicorp | Chase Manhattan
Ford | GM
General Electric | Westinghouse
Hewlett-Packard | Texas Instrumetn
IBM | Burroughs
Johnson & Johnson | Bristol-Myers Squibb
Marriott | Howard Johnson
Merck | Pfizer
Motorola | Zenith
Nordstrom | Melville
Proctor & Gamble | Colgate
Sony | Kenwood
Wal-Mart | Ames
Walt Disney | Columbia
The Myth of the “Great Idea”

When I talk to business schools occasionally, the professor of management is devastated when I say that we didn’t have any plans when we started—we were just opportunistic. We did anything that would bring in a nickel. We had a bowling foul-line indicator, a clock drive for a telescope, a thing to make a urinal flush automatically, and a shock machine to make people lose weight. Here we were, with about $500 in capital, trying whatever someone thought we might be able to do. - Bill Hewlett

Instead of trying to turn a great idea into a company, visionary companies worked on building a great company. Habits

• Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs)
• Cult-Like Culture
• Try a Lot of Stuff and Keep What Works
• Home-grown Management
• Good Enough Never Is

After reading a lot about happiness, creativity and successful companies, they are all related. When you read a lot of things, they begin to blur together. Each habit in Built to Last reminded me of something I read elsewhere. Is there a reason why every company can’t be visionary?