It’s over twenty years since Jim Collins and Jerry Porras published their landmark book Built to Last, but the lessons we learned back then are applicable today. In the book, Collins and Porras identified eighteen companies (Disney, P&G, Marriott, Nordstrom, General Electric, etc.) that had significantly out-performed financial markets over a minimum fifty year period while “weaving themselves into the very fabric of society”. The authors identified several variables that distinguished these eighteen companies from others that had realized only average returns. Perhaps the foundation of the book is a variable called “Preserve the Core/Stimulate Progress”, that states that visionary companies must be willing to stimulate progress by changing just about everything about its business except its core values.

Indeed, the eighteen visionary companies were willing to blow many parts of their businesses and business models up in the drive for progress:

  • Walt Disney was willing to “bet its reputation on Disneyland with no market data to indicate demand for such a wild dream”
  • Ford staked its future on the audacious goal of “democratizing the automobile”
  • Motorola lived by the motto “Be in motion for motion’s sake” and this “propelled the company from battery eliminators and car radios to televisions, microprocessors, cellular communications, satellites circling the earth and pursuit of daunting “six sigma” quality standards”
  • 3M’s relentless drive to solve problems and innovate resulted in pervasive innovations such as waterproof sandpaper, Scotch tape and Post-it notes
  • Boeing “made the decision to build the B-747 in spite of highly uncertain market demand”

At the same time, each one of the eighteen visionary companies “carefully preserved and protected its core ideology” which was based on core values and preserving the founders” identities. Collins and Porras wrote that “the interplay between core and progress is one of the most important findings from our work”:

  • “The core ideology enables progress by providing a base of continuity around which a visionary company can evolve, experiment and change.Being clear about what is core (and therefore relatively fixed), a company can more easily seek variation and movement in all that is not core”
  • “The drive for progress enables the core ideology, for without continual change and forward movement, the company – the carrier of the core – will fall behind in an ever-changing world and cease to be strong, or perhaps even to exist”

It is highly recommended that today’s leaders re-visit Built to Last (and Collins’ other ground-breaking book Good to Great) and start to implement the many variables that are the result of extensive research by the authors. Learning the lessons associated with “Preserve the Core/Stimulate Progress” is an excellent starting point!