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Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (Harper Business Essentials)
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Sales rank 12,820
Customers rating (based on 167 reviews)
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Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies and studied each in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. They examined the companies from their very beginnings to the present day -- as start-ups, as midsize companies, and as large corporations. Throughout, the authors asked: "What makes the truly exceptional companies different from the comparison companies and what were the common practices these enduringly great companies followed throughout their history?" Filled with hundreds of specific examples and organized into a coherent framework of practical concepts that can be applied by managers and entrepreneurs at all levels, Built to Last provides a master blueprint for building organizations that will prosper long into the 21st century and beyond.
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| Publisher | Harper Paperbacks | | Release date | 08/2002 | | Availability | Usually ships in 24 hours | | Edition | Paperback |
| | List price | $17.99 | | Our price | $12.23 (you save 32.02%) | | Used price | from $0.62 |
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Was Built To Last Built To Last?: It's one of the most influential business books of our era, and it helped turn coauthor Jim Collins into a management rock star. But how well have the companies it lionized and the principles it espoused stood the test of time? (@ Fast Company)
Built to Flip: An intriguing idea: No need to build a company, much less one with enduring value. Today, it's enough to pull together a good story, to implement the rough draft of an idea, and -- presto! -- instant wealth (@ Fast Company)
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 A Classic On Organizational Leadership for Peak Performance
This was my favorite leadership book of the nineties. I have referred to and quoted from this profound book many times since reading it in 1994 (cited in my books Pathways to Performance: A Guide to Transforming Yourself, Your Team, and Your Organization and The Leader's Digest: Timeless Principles for Team and Organization Success). Based on extensive research of 18 "visionary companies" and 18 corresponding "comparison companies," the authors explore why visionary companies (all founded before 1950) still lead their industry and surpass their much less successful competitors. Collins and Porras give us deep insight into why "visionary companies prosper over long periods of time, through multiple product life cycles and multiple generations of active leaders." Anyone interested in building a high performance culture must read this powerful book.
Insightful and Thought Provoking
Jim Collins and Jerry Porras' "Built to Last" is a wonderfully insightful and thought provoking book. The basic idea is that there are clear divisions between great companies and exceptional companies (i.e. the top 5% and the top 1%). The authors spent the better part of two decades researching and
The best thing about the book is that unlike some other business management books which proclaim to be Gospel, "Built to Last" challanges the reader to come up with his or her own interpretation of the study done by Mr. Collins and Mr. Porras. While it can be argued the facts speak for themselves, the facts are also at times contradictory, and while the authors make a clear case for their way of thinking, there is still room for the reader to make up his or her own mind. As a reader and professional "student" of business, it is a pleasure to see the culmination of the research and not have to do any of the leg work to go along with gathering it.
"Built to Last" is an insightful look at the companies that have set themselves apart in their respective industries. The book is research based and offers the findings of the research as well as the authors' interpretation for the reader to analyze and form his or her own opinion. The book is not overwhelming in the least and is written in everyday speak.
All in all, a great, timeless, business management book. Buy this book today, and get the hardcover (so it lasts).
 Fascinating Read
I picked up Built To Last after reading Good to Great and then went immediately to How The Mighty Fall. All three are fabulous especially in light of the current economy! Dr. Collins provides extraordinary insight into what makes an organization succeed and what allows one to fail. Because of these works I look at all the organizations in my life differently: my company, Boy Scouts, athletic teams, volunteer programs, even my family.
A clasic must read
An absolute must read along with the follow on Built to Last. The extensive research behind this book is evident and the conclusions may surprise you. If your current business isn't everything you want it to be you may find the answers here.
One of the Best Business Books
There are some sections of the bookstore that don't really offer books per se but just a one-page powerpoint presentation of a trendy idea stretched far too thinly into a manuscript: the health section with all its diet fads, the lifestyle section with all its pretentious spirituality, and the business section with all its lame management-speak. "Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies" by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras is really only just a business book but for the banal business genre it's pretty good.
For one thing "Built to Last" actually says interesting things. Its main argument is that companies that are "built to last" are so because they have some core principles that they follow religiously and which constitute their identity and their long-term vision, and outside these principles they're dynamic and flexible. The authors point out that these habits are also indicative of successful NGOs, social/civic organizations, and government agencies -- I would even go further and point out that these habits are also indicative of a successful individual and a successful society.
Business executives who buy this book will discover two major flaws with it. First, the book's ideas and principles are good and sound but almost impossible to implement. The problem with being the best is that you have to be, by definition, better than everyone else. Second, there are no concrete suggestions in the book. "Preserve the Core/Stimulate Progress" and "Clock Building, Not Time Telling" may all be good and key but how do you implement them in an organization? More useful to read Machiavelli or watch "The Godfather."
What the book ultimately fails to mention is that great organizations cannot be engineered or created. Read Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" -- another great and perfectly useless business book -- and you realize that for a phenomenon to have impact different individuals have to play different roles at different times. Perhaps a bookstore's business section suffers from ignoring a fundamental principle behind a business's section: that it makes good people who are fortunate to have good ideas that are also right for the times. But that's neither marketable nor worth mentioning, and so business writers must resort to either glibness or in the case of "Built to Last" lofty but impractical management-speak.
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