Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry I Porras

"Built To Last: Successful Habits Of Visionary Companies is the detailed results of a research project by the authors into what goes into the making of great visionaries, and how their companies last through the ages.

Summary Of The Book

• 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."