A six-year study of companies that endure for generations, and the habits that set them apart.
A leader with all the answers dies and takes the answers along. Visionary companies build organizations that keep ticking through many generations of leaders.
Core values and purpose almost never change - and there is no 'correct' set, only ones genuinely held. Everything else - goals, products, strategies - must change relentlessly.
Every visionary company held a core ideology - values and a purpose beyond money. The authors call it pragmatic idealism, and these firms were highly profitable anyway.
Enduring companies insist on both at once: stability AND change, low cost AND high quality, purpose AND profit. Either/or thinking is the trap.
Most visionary companies began with no specific idea, a slow start, or an outright flop - Sony's first product was a rice cooker that failed. The founders' real creation was the organization itself.
The rest of this summary — and the one thing to do this week — is in the PDF.
Download the free PDFCollins and Porras, researchers at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, spent six years comparing 18 visionary companies - Disney, Boeing, Hewlett-Packard, 3M, Merck - against close rivals that were good but not great. The visionary firms, founded on average in 1897, had outperformed the general stock market fifteen-fold since 1926. The authors dug through a century of records to find what makes a company endure for generations instead of fading after one leader or one hot product.
Their most famous answer is 'clock building, not time telling.' A time teller is a brilliant leader with all the answers. A clock builder creates an organization that keeps ticking after they are gone. The visionary companies built clocks: cultures, systems, and values that outlive any single person.
