Built to Last

The Question Behind the Book

Pick any company you admire and try to explain why it has survived for a hundred years. The honest answer is almost never the one people give. Most explanations reach for a single charismatic founder, a brilliant product, a moment of perfect market timing. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras spent six years at Stanford trying to figure out whether those stories actually hold up, and the answer they came back with is one of the more unsettling claims in business literature. The companies that endure for a century or more share almost nothing in common with the romantic founder story we keep telling ourselves. What they share is something much less glamorous and much more useful, which is that someone, very early on, decided to build a clock instead of telling the time.

Built to Last is the book where that distinction gets made. Published in 1994, it studies eighteen companies that were widely admired by knowledgeable executives, founded before 1950, still industry premier institutions, and had already survived multiple generations of CEOs and multiple product life cycles. Companies like Hewlett-Packard, 3M, Sony, Disney, Boeing, Procter and Gamble, Merck, Johnson and Johnson, Wal-Mart. Then Collins and Porras did the thing most management books refuse to do. They picked a direct competitor for each one — a company founded around the same time, in roughly the same business, with similar starting odds. Norton against 3M. Zenith against Motorola. Kenwood against Sony. Burroughs against IBM. Howard Johnson against Marriott. They went through more than three thousand documents, sixty thousand pages of company history, and stock data back to 1926, asking a single relentless question. What was essentially different about the companies that became great?