Jim Collins and Jerry L. Porras
Built to Last
ISBN: 978-0-06-056610-4
What makes a company endure? How does an institution survive after an amazing CEO or founder leaves, retires, or passes on? Many founders have these questions on their minds when their companies are young and growing. If your goal as a founder is to build something that your children and grandchildren can enjoy and not to build something for the purpose of selling it to the highest bidder as quickly as possible, you want to know what to do in order to set up the company for success over decades and centuries.
Jim Collins and Jerry Porras found 18 companies out of hundreds of publicly traded companies that have stood as “visionary” examples of lasting companies in their study, Built to Last. These were organizations that did great things beyond one or two great CEOs, and they compared these “visionary” companies to 18 other companies that did great things with one or two CEOs but did not thrive beyond those leaders.
How does one become a “visionary” company? It all boils down to the attitude of the CEO. Is the CEO interested in creating a lasting company and culture, or is the CEO interested in promoting himself? Does the CEO promote big, hairy, audacious goals? Is management promoted from within, or does the company look to an outside savior when things go wrong? Does the company have a strong set of core values set by the CEO, or are they swayed by opinions of the day or by the person in charge at the moment? Does the CEO create a “cult-like” culture inside the company, or does the CEO ignore culture in search of the next dollar? Think about these things when building your own company.
It would be interesting for someone to perform this study again in about 20 years, 50 years after the publication of this book, to see if any of the companies on the list would change and if any new companies would be added. In future reviews, I’ll cover Collins’ other books in the series where he had to discuss at least a couple of companies mentioned in this book and how they fell from grace. The main points of the study probably wouldn’t change – it would just be interesting to see which more recent companies would make the list and which current CEOs would be mentioned. In this era of the “celebrity CEO,” it’s always fun to take a more scientific, data-driven view on their performance as compared to what we hear and see in the media.
There were so much information packed into this one book – the appendices on this book, along with Jim Collins’ other books in the series – take up about the last third of the text, in addition to the charts, graphs, and illustrations in the main text of the book. Even as densely packed as this book was, it was a breeze to read. Collins and Porras got straight to the point in each chapter and referred the reader to the appendices for more information. I actually knocked out this entire book while on a recent business trip – it kept me hooked while waiting for flights to leave, but wasn’t so complicated that I had to re-read sections when distracted by noise in the airport.
Overall, 10/10, would highly recommend to those building businesses who want their creations to stand the test of time, long after the company founders are gone. This was one of the best business books I’ve read in a while, and this is just the first in a series of books that Jim Collins has written highlighting the best companies in America and what they have done to get there. Many of the book’s points have been covered in other business books since this was written in the 1990s – it was just nice to finally have a chance to read the source material. If you want your business to live on long after you’re gone, this book is the advice for you.