Built to Last: The True Test of Timeless Companies

It's not hard. It's not intellectually challenging once you stand back and think about it. When people criticize from the list, I scratch my head and think what an odd thing. To update the list today, for me that wouldn't be a worthwhile endeavor because I was more interested in answering the big unanswered question of how do you turn good into great, than updating a list. My problem is not a lack of ideas. My problem is that I've got one life, maybe 60 years of productive work total, 65 if I'm lucky. And that is 1/100th of what I need to execute on the ideas I have. I'm always pointed on the horse looking forward.

I'll tell you the one thing I have been incredibly frustrated with, though. Probably the thing that is most -- what I've had to most hammer into people, what people don't get as easily -- is that the BTL ideas are very much about the "And." One of the things that really has frustrated me has been peoples' perception that BTL is about preservation, conservation, stasis, stability. To be built to last, you have to be built to change. And we always said that. If you read chapter four, where we introduce the most important law of physics to come from this book, the most important chapter of this book. Preserve the core and stimulate progress. You can have the most deeply cherished and meaningful core ideology, but if it just sits still or refuses to change, the world will pass it by.

And we even talk about IBM in its time of trouble. We believe IBM began to lose its stature in the early '90s in part because it lost sight of this difference that you need both sides of the coin. The crucial thing is that you need hand-in-hand with that preserving of the core is this absolutely relentless, pounding, ferocious, neurotic, passionate drive for progress. They're anything but stasis. I'll share with you a very interesting little thing. Turns out when you study religious institutions, there's a very interesting thing, say a theological seminary. You ask yourself the question, which theological seminaries are better able to change? It turns out that it's the conservative ones. You ask yourself, why is that? It's because they have such clarity of their conservative values that they're more easily able to change all their practices. Because they're very clear about their values as an anchor point. So, if you were to say what I have learned since BTL, it's that people didn't get the "and." People will say, Well you know, it's a new world that's changing, you have really be able to embrace change. And I'm like, funny, we wrote six chapters on that. I don't understand. It's preserve the core and stimulate progress. What preserve the core/stimulate progress does is create an institutional set of processes that map to a very, very deep primal human distinction: our need to believe and our need to create.

FC: You've likened BTL's principles to physics. But it's possible to prove physics wrong?

Collins: Or right.

FC: Good point. So could someone ever prove BTL right or wrong?

Collins: I guess what I worry most about in our work -- my own fears. I think it's unlikely that preserve the core/stimulate progress would be overturned in 50 years, because it's such a deeply human, truthful insight about truly the way humans and systems work. I just don't think it's going to be overturned. It could be, I suppose. You could have simple enough evidence to subvert it. But I think with match-pair method and all that, I'm reasonably confident, I'd never say 100%, but reasonably confident. I'll tell you what I am worried about. I'm worried about what else we're going to discover that will make it such that what we've found so far is only 10 or 20% of the equation. I'm not scared of preserve the core/stimulate progress or Level 5 leadership from GTG being overturned. I'm scared that they're going to turn out to be so relatively insignificant compared to something we haven't discovered yet.

FC: Is that what motivates you to keep researching new areas?

Collins: I'm motivated by two things: curiosity and impact. Curiosity means, I don't want to look under the yellow hat, like Curious George, just to prove that I'm right. I want to look under the yellow hat to see what I see. True scientific inquiry. I just love the research process. I love discovering. The other side is impact. You know, I've already had success. I'm worried more about impact long beyond my lifetime. And you know, the only ideas that ultimately have impact are the ones that are right. Coming up with ideas just to have success -- and I never started a consulting firm, I never started a business out of this stuff. Peter Drucker once asked me, so do you want to build an organization to last or do you want to build ideas to last? I said, oh clearly the second. I want to build some ideas to last. And he said, then you must not build an organization. One of my goals in life is to leave behind a few ideas and methods of ideas that last. The only way that will happen is if they're right. History wipes out those who aren't right. So, unless you grasp that that's what I'm up to, you just can't grasp all this stuff. Success has just been incidental. In fact, I wasn't even prepared for success. It's been a complete surprise. In some ways it's been nice. In some ways, though, it's actually in some ways harder to be successful. I was never prepared for the problems of success. And they're a different set of problems and I'm a neophyte in learning how to deal with them.

If you rewound the tape to say 1999, right in the crux of the GTG research, right in the middle of it, just really buried down in it, we don't know what we're going to find, we're going through all this data. You go back to then and then you fast forward to 2004 and we have a million-and-a-half hardcover copies, I don't know how many around the world -- levels of success I could have never ever imagined, and you had asked me, which year am I happier, 2004 or 1999? Hands down, 10-to-1, 1999. Yeah. Not that I'm unhappy. But I just love picking new ideas off the tree. When things become more successful than you ever dared to hope or imagine, you find a very interesting thing. You get the rise of the critics and the moochers. I pretty much ignore the critics and unfortunately I have to deal with the moochers -- people who want to jump on the bandwagon and start GTG consulting firms or something. We get invitations for partnerships of that kind probably 2-3 times per week. We say no to them all. But it's people who want to get on that boat.