Was <em>Built To Last</em> Built To Last?

It's been a decade since Jim Collins and Jerry Porras wrote Built to Last, a book that took the management world by storm. But some of its companies haven't held up as well as its sales.

Doug Ducey, the CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, will never forget the first time he read Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, the management book by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras that is one of the best-selling business books ever. Or the first time he listened to it, anyway.

"I was driving to San Diego with my family," he says, as though he's remembering a spiritual conversion. "The kids had just fallen asleep. And we put on the CD." As he heard Collins and Porras describing a group of 18 companies they defined as visionary, including Procter & Gamble, where Ducey used to work, the clouds parted and the angels sang. He found himself agreeing with virtually everything they said. "Whenever I read a book, there's probably, at best, two or three sentences that will stick out in my head. With Built to Last," he says reverentially, "it was more like two or three chapters."

As Ducey built Cold Stone from a regional ice-cream company into a national brand, he embraced many of the book's principles, such as having a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, or BHAG, a long-term vision that is supposed to be so daring in its scope as to seem impossible. Although Collins says that goal should be something that takes decades, Ducey chose a shorter-term one in August of 1999, when there were just 74 Cold Stone stores. He vowed to have 1,000 profitable stores by the end of this year, and he's going to make it. "I've seen dramatic, positive change in the right direction applying these principles," he says.

Such near-fanatical responses to a book by two little-known guys from Stanford, one of whom (Collins) doesn't even have a PhD, have made Built to Last one of the very few business books that achieve the dual honor of being both a publisher's dream and a management classic. Now celebrating the 10-year anniversary of its unheralded publication in 1994, BTL has sold 3.5 million copies worldwide, been translated into 16 languages, gone through more than 70 printings, and spent nearly five solid years on the Business Week best-seller list. The momentum continues even today: HarperBusiness, its publisher, is putting out a new hardcover edition in January 2005. Along with Collins's later solo effort, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don't, BTL has turned Collins, a rock-climbing 46-year-old, into the Bill Clinton of the business world, a guy who gets stopped on the street and begged for advice (or an autograph) and who is a riveting speaker, pulling $55,000 per session. "It never occurred to me that things would be this successful," says Collins. "It never occurred to me."

And now enough time has passed to merit a reassessment of one of the most influential business books of our time. Are BTL's principles still relevant in an era of massive consolidation and global outsourcing? Did the visionary companies celebrated in its pages turn out to be the corporate equivalents of the Rolling Stones or of the 1980s one-hit-wonder group A-Ha? Given that the book is still winning the hearts and minds of people such as Cold Stone's Ducey, we decided to take a close look at its key ideas and the track records of the companies it singled out as visionary.

What we found was that while the companies in BTL were indeed built to last, they haven't all been built to emulate. As for the principles, many of them still hold up today, partly because some of them are so broad as to appear applicable to virtually everyone. "It's so slippery, it's like grabbing a frog," says Richard D'Aveni, professor of strategic management at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, of the book. To take this book -- or any business book -- as gospel is to set yourself up for a fall.

Ten years on, almost half of the visionary companies on the list have slipped dramatically in performance and reputation, and their vision currently seems more blurred than clairvoyant. Consider the fates of Motorola, Ford, Sony, Walt Disney, Boeing, Nordstrom, and Merck. Each has struggled in recent years, and all have faced serious questions about their leadership and strategy. Odds are, none of them today would meet BTL's criteria for visionary companies, which required that they be the premier player in their industry and be widely admired by people in the know.