Built to last?

What makes companies successful and stable? “Built to Last” (Collins/Porras, 1997) for example looked at 18 „visionary“ companies with a great and global brand and that were at least 50 years old. Among other things, leadership throughout a company was key, a strong corporate culture, and excellence. 13 years later, a large number of the companies researched went out of business or had been taken over. A closer look at a sample of four companies who survived, showed that they mostly object to shareholder value, place emphasis on long term planning, on succession management, and on a strong corporate culture. Collins, Good to Great (2001), also mentions corporate culture as the most important success factor.

“Excellence” has been another subject of a bespoke study carried out in 1982 as well. “In Search of Excellence” (Waterman) came up with eight methods that would lead to market success, among them active decision making, a lean organisation and being close to the customer. With but few exceptions, most of the companies who were featured in the book meanwhile went out of business or had to recover from major crisis and failures and are much smaller today than at the time. And again, little was written about values and ethics. Is there no correlation between excellence and the latter?

Today, we know values seem to play a crucial role. And the kind of leadership you have in your organisation. Read more about this on these pages.