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Built Not to Last
I recently came across some interesting nuggets in the Fast Company archives (a treasure trove of ahead-of-their-time business articles) on the necessity of "creative destruction." Some sound bites ...
In "The Death of Corporate Permanence," Adam Hanft says, "The free market tells us that bankruptcy can be a good thing, in the way that the death of an old tree allows younger ones under its oppressive canopy to grow ... We've experienced what can only be called the Death of Permanence; what remains to be seen is the way the new Economy of the Evanescent will influence our business and even personal interactions."
In the article "Built to Flip," Christina L Darwell says, "Increasingly, successful businesses will be ephemeral. Instead of being built to last, they will be built to yield something of value—and once that value has been exhausted, they will vanish."
In the same piece Gary Sutton adds, "The problem with Built to Last is that it's a romantic notion. Large companies are incapable of ongoing innovation, of ongoing flexibility. Companies that are built to last forever usually find out too late that the world has changed right under their noses. ... Nothing lasts forever, and one attribute of sustainability is knowing when your time has come."
Exciting stuff (to me anyway). [Note from Cathy: You might recognize these as quotes Tom himself has used. It's no surprise to us that a long-term denizen of Tom Peters Company picked the same ones.]
But these quotes raise a few questions. Many readers of both this website and Fast Company are entrepreneurs, small business owners, and consultants who live in the service economy. But what about the manufacturing world? For those of you who are Change Agents in the industrial sector, how do you sell "Destroy to Create," "Cherish Impermanence," and "Make a Quick Exit"? How does "destroy it before your competition does" go over in manufacturing environments that take pride in their history and longevity? Let's talk.
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Comments
How about "software permanence"! I love simple HTML ... an informative web-page can be quickly composed. No bells-and-whistles, only the information the clients (and Google) need, on-line within minutes ... backward-compatible to old browser versions and forward-compatible (so far ...). But, of course, there's almost no money in it for the software vendors ....
Posted by Mike L at April 24, 2007 4:44 PM
anyone paying attention these days knows you need a fast reverse gear to survive - you have to blow up what's not working, whether it's a product, process, or business model - otherwise the company itself is on the block - why should it be different in manufacturing??
Posted by Robert at April 25, 2007 7:16 AM
John:
Let me remind you of my favorite priniciple: Everything changes...EVERYTHING!
How it changes and how each individual interprets the order of those changes is necessary for the survival of any individual or any business; service or manufacturing. To me, their survival is based on a number of things:
1. Knowledge of how everything changes
2. Their interpretation of those changes
3. Their intuition working or not working.
4. Their learned knowledge useful or not useful.
5. Their emotional attachment,like pride, based on a healthy relationship or an unhealthy one.
In other words: Their ability to change!
David Snieckus
www.davidsnieckus
Posted by David Snieckus at April 25, 2007 7:57 AM
"Large companies are incapable of ongoing innovation, of ongoing flexibility." That would be large companies like GE or Proctor and Gamble or Toyota or Southwest Airlines?
Come on! There are lots of big companies that have learned to be nimble and lots of small companies mired in the mud of "we've always done it that way." The idea that anything big is automatically a dinosaur is every bit as romantic and theological a notion as "built to last."
Posted by Wally Bock at April 25, 2007 8:11 AM
John - Interesting topic. Having worked in a number of companies no longer in existence, it's one I think about quite a bit. While there are a number of reasons I can point to why the companies I was with failed - most of which came down to lack of focus, or a too-little-too-late decision to hunker down and focus just as the money was running out - it really is all about business Darwinism. The fittest - large or small - will survive because they adapt.Traces of the not so fit will survive, too, vestigial organs in the companies that acquired them...
Your readers might be interested in a recent post on the same topic over on Trusted Advisor. (Link: http://trustedadvisor.com/blog/121/ )
Posted by Maureen Rogers at April 25, 2007 9:30 AM
David, not sure what you mean by your #5. But you remind me of Heraclitus's dictum, "You can't step into the same river twice" - trumped by the brilliant (as always) response of Nietzsche: "You can't step into the same river once."
Wally, there's always some hyperbole in such grand pronouncements (as Gary Sutton's), but I think your examples are the exceptions proving the rule. I'm sure others will want to weigh in on that one.
Posted by John O'Leary at April 25, 2007 9:58 AM
INTUITION. respond to the given situation in a positive, constructive way and don't think too much how the future could be.
Don't predict the future or analyse it, envision and build your own take of the future.
Dont explain the world, create it and change the rules of the game.
Don't believe what companies and governments what one to think... question all and build your own...
Posted by timo at April 25, 2007 9:58 AM
You sparked some ideas on my part today (http://facilitatedsystems.com/weblog/2007/04/does-sustainability-in-business-mean.html). Thanks!
Posted by Bill Harris at April 25, 2007 10:11 AM
John:
Thanks for responding. Hey and I just love what timo posted on Intuition.
Emotional attachment like pride can be healthy or unhealthy, depending on our view of life. Any great product or service or even religion, for that matter, started out with an individual who took pride and had a deep feeling of being helpful to society. Take someone like Henry Ford. I would say he had a certain pride and wanted a reasonably priced car for everyone. As time went on, everything changing, money became something more of the issue than the pride in a great car. I would conjecture, the employees of Ford and GM are not as full of pride for their work as Henry Ford was. Over time pride deminished: Specialization increased for greater productivity, employees and management were separated by unions and pay, and pride in the product vanished. It became more about profit and money than pride. Today, we have Toyota outpacing GM. I would speculate, Toyota has instilled a pride in everyone to build a better car and has been able to maintain that pride with employee participation.
Anyway getting back to pride. Pride can be healthy, beneficial and productive if on a daily basis we are greatful for what we have accomplished and see ourselves as being able to do or be better and better everyday. In other words, everyday one gets up and says: "Yesterday's gone, what am I going to do today?" What Am I going to do to make a better product or service for my clients!
Pride can be unhealthy if we just use our past accomplishments as something we rely on. For example: If one's College Degrees or Advanced Training Certificates, or past cars are pointed to and gloated over, the individual or company becomes stagnated and sick. When that individual wakes up everyday and says: "I'm going to do the same thing I did yesterday because it worked yesterday", then you have a pride that's unhealthy!
Posted by David Snieckus at April 25, 2007 5:01 PM
How about pride in knowing your business can blow things up and start again with the aim of adding value. So pride in being part of a team that adds value.
How about pride in knowing your business is thriving on chaos... :)
Posted by Steve Gray at April 25, 2007 5:39 PM
Bill, I like the points you made on your blog about the sustainability of the larger living system requiring the death and decay of organisms within that system (I'm paraphrasing). And we humans can be in denial of not just our personal mortality but our "enterprise mortality." (There's a book title in there somewhere, which we offer free of charge to any enterprising authors, mortal or otherwise.)
Posted by John O'Leary at April 25, 2007 8:46 PM
John O'Leary (and Tom Peters too)
Perhaps I misread Jim Collins, but I did not take his use of the term
“BUILT TO LAST†to mean “BUILT TO STAY THE SAME.â€
What I thought I read was this: building a company that lasts takes a
leader who looks and thinks until the leader figures out how the company
can best use its resources (with the emphasis on human resources) to
serve customers profitably.
That this looking and thinking is not quick or superficial, but closer to the
“look deep, deep into nature, and then you will understand everything
better†of Albert Einstein. (O. K., maybe not THAT deep, but I hope
Einstein gets us closer to the point: this thinking and looking may change
the company as radically as Einstein changed physics.)
And even if the company stays very much the same for years or decades,
the looking and thinking is always going on and the leader is always
prepared to come to new insights and turn those insights into experiments
to determine if the company should make new changes — be those
changes small or great.)
Did I really read him wrong?
John
Posted by Shakespeare's Fool at April 25, 2007 11:37 PM
I don't think that's a misreading of Collins' work. My concern is when the Built to Last philosophy is used to justify survival at all costs - of your job, your project, your department, or even your company.
Posted by John O'Leary at April 26, 2007 9:06 AM
where is Lou Dobbs when we need him? Lou would have a fit with this, having established a career for himself defending dinosaur business practices .
Posted by Robert at April 26, 2007 10:06 AM
Just put a posting on my site which answers this question for manufacturing: Technical Nutrients (McDonough) and the rise of cheap (sub-$500) desktop fabricators. (RepRap)
Together they present a fairly good recipe for making physical goods as changeable and impermanent as the digital world.
Imagine downloading physical products off the internet to a desktop fabricator instead of manufacturing and shipping them. One stated goal of the RepRap project is to make fabricator upgrades able to be built by earlier fabs.
By making your old stuff the raw materials (technical nutrients) for all your new stuff, fabricators and technical nutrients have a lot of potential.
Posted by Design Crux at April 26, 2007 10:15 AM
I think that this topic is at the heart of what is meant by "seduction of the ego," vs. "living with responsibility for one's higher nature." Hey, after all, isn't the sign of spiritual awareness that one lives in the moment, with total responsibility for what one is creating in this moment, and not trying to find an illusive security by holding onto the past.
And, in addition, it is the higher satisfactions which come from the empowered inner state of going beyond ego consciousness, that allows one to let go of any security from the past, including the disempowering choice to keep things the same, when external conditions are requiring a different response. This is known in spiritual terminology as "letting go of attachment." Success in the business world, as I believe success in all things, comes from taking the responsibility to live a spiritual life.
Being flexible, and relatively painlessly adapting to change is totally an empowering spiritual virtue (as perhaps everything is). Sustaining the ego consciousness is exhausting, and thus doesn't create the energy necessary to match the optimal response with the changing external circumstances. This ability to always choose one's actions, based on what is the optimal response, and not what is the "comfortable response," is what I think is meant by the term "righteousness." And it gives one the power of living totally in the present.
I know that this comment is of a very different nature than all the previous ones, but, hey,I know almost nothing about the business world, and so didn't feel qualified to comment on it from a business angle, and I wanted to shake things up and look at this from a totally different angle.
Posted by Barry Harris at April 27, 2007 10:39 AM
Hi Again,
I just realized, after I sent my entry, that I wrote my comments on the importance of spiritual consciousness in order to be able to adapt to change, as if I were talking about a person.
But can't companies be looked at like persons, as the wonderful movie "The Corporation," claims? I think that everything I just said about individual spiritual responsibility, would be the same both for companies, as well as for the CEOs and all the employees who make up the company. If they have these spiritual virtues just mentioned, it's pretty likely so well the company itself, and thus have an advantage in achieving success, compared to companies who still live by the old non-spiritual paradigms.
Posted by Barry Harris at April 27, 2007 10:51 AM
Maureen, my apologies: somehow I missed your comments until now. (There's often a time delay to a comment being posted if it includes a link.) The TrustedAdvisor.com blog you refer to, by Charles Green, nails it for me:
"The truth is: focusing on “lasting†as an attribute of a company these days is likely to confuse rather than enlighten. The continued existence of a particular corporate organization is a pretty un-inspiring goal, when you think of it. Ironically, the continued existence of a particularly corporate instantiation probably requires high turnover in shareholders, employees, geographies and even consumers. So who exactly cares if it’s lasting?
The point is not to last. The point is to do great things for all your constituents. Where continued existence helps, great. Otherwise, standing water stagnates. The visionary thing works; but these days, the vision had better be to change, morph, grow, evolve, turnover, shift."
Amen.
Posted by John O'Leary at April 28, 2007 7:49 AM