Built to Last (Hardcover)

In Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, the authors, Collins and Porras, list out the results of a six-year long research undertaking, one that they conducted at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. They took eighteen companies that they labelled ‘visionary’, and found out what sets them apart from the rest.

The term ‘visionary’ in this book means that the company was begun before 1950, has proved its merit in terms of commercial success, has a considerable trust value in the eyes of the general public and has outperformed its other peers and contemporaries. The authors highlight eighteen companies, all of which are a hundred years old on an average, and have been ahead of the stock market by at least fifteen per cent since 1926.

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies will tell readers how Procter & Gamble, though established well after arch-rival Colgate, still managed to get ahead and become a household name throughout the world, despite this handicap. The book also talks about how an inconspicuous battery repairing company by the name of Motorola later took the cellular world by storm.

Why is Walt Disney so popular, while other animation studios have fallen behind? What makes Hewlett Packard such a respected name in the world of electronics? How did Sony make it to the exalted position that it now enjoys in the corporate world? Other companies like General Electric, Wal-Mart, IBM, 3M, and Boeing are also spoken about in this book. Readers can understand all this and more when they peruse Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies.

About The Authors
James C. Collins, known more popularly as Jim Collins, was born in 1958 in Colorado. He is a lecturer on the sustainability of companies, and their growth patterns.

Jim Collins has written other books like Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … And Others Don’t, Great by Choice, How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In and Good to Great and the Social Sectors.

Jim Collins obtained a degree in Mathematics from Stanford University, after which he completed his MBA, then doing eighteen months of consultant praxis with McKinsey. He then joined Hewlett Packard in the capacity of a Product Manager. He presently conducts business management related research at a management laboratory which he began in Colorado.

Jerry I. Porras is a professor at Stanford University, in the Graduate School of Business. He is also the Professor Emeritus of Organizational Behaviour and Change.

He has written books such as Built to Change: How to Achieve Sustained Organizational Effectiveness and Success Built to Last: Creating A Life That Matters.
Porras is an analyst of business and management.