W h y s o m e c o m p a n I e s m a k e t h e
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| C H A P T E R 9 It is your Work in life that is the ultimate seduction. hen we began the Good to Great research project, we confronted a How should we think about the ideas in Built to Last while doing the Good to Great research Briefly, Built to Last, based on a six-year research project conducted at Stanford Business School in the early answered the question, What does it take to start and build an enduring great company from the ground up My research mentor and coauthor Jerry I. Porras and I studied eighteen enduring great companies-institutions that stood the test of time, tracing their founding in some cases back to the while becoming the iconic great companies of the late twentieth century. We examined companies like Procter & Gamble (founded in American Express founded in Johnson Johnson (founded in and GE founded in 1892). One of the companies, Citicorp (now Citigroup, was founded in 1812, the same year Napoleon marched into Moscow The "youngest" companies in the study were Wal-Mart and Sony, which trace their origins back to 1945. Similar to this book, we used direct comparison Good to Great companies- M versus Norton, Walt Disney versus Columbia Pictures, Marriott versus Howard Johnson, and so forth-for eighteen paired comparisons. In short, we sought to identify the essential distinctions between great companies and good companies as they endure over decades, even centuries. When I had the first summer research team assembled for the good-to- great project, I asked, "What should be the role of Built to Last in doing this study" I don't think it should play any role" said Brian Bagley. "I didn't join this team to do a derivative piece of work" Neither did added Alyson Sinclair. excited about anew project and anew question. It wouldn't be very fulfilling to just fill in the pieces of your other book" But wait a minute" I responded. "We spent six years on the previous study. It might be helpful to build on our previous work" I seem to recall that you got the idea for this study when a partner said that Built to Last didn't answer the question of how to change a good company into a great noted Paul Weissman. "What if the answers are different" Back and forth, to and fro, the debate continued fora few weeks. Then Stefanie Judd weighed in with the argument that swayed me. I love the ideas in Built to Last and that's what worries me" she said. "I'm afraid that if we start with as the frame of reference, we'll just go around in circles, proving our own biases" It became clear that there would be substantially less risk in starting from scratch, setting out to discover what we would, whether it matched previous work or not, Now, five years later, with this book complete, we can stand back to look at the two works in the context of each other. Surveying across the two studies, I offer the following four conclusions 190 Collins 1. When I consider the enduring great companies from Built to Last, I now see substantial evidence that their early leaders followed the good-to-great framework. The only real difference is that they did so as entrepreneurs in small, early-stage enterprises trying to get off the ground, rather than as trying to transform established companies from good to great. 2. In an ironic twist, I now see Good to Great not as a sequel to Built to Last, but as a prequel. Apply the findings in this book to create sustained great results, as a startup or an established organization, and then apply the findings in Built to Last to go from great results to an enduring great company. Established Good to Sustained Built to Enduring Company + Great Great + Last Great or Startup Concepts Results Concepts Company 3. To make the shift from a company with sustained great results to an enduring great company of iconic stature, apply the central concept from Built to Last Discover your core values and purpose beyond just making money (core ideology) and combine this with the dynamic of preserve the progress. 4. A tremendous resonance exists between the two studies the ideas from each enrich and inform the ideas in the other. In particular, Good to Great answers a fundamental question raised, but not answered, in Built to Last What is the difference between a "good" BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) and a "bad' BHAG? Download 3.69 Mb. Share with your friends:
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