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

BTL's success has come as much from its context as its content. The same was true of the first real business blockbuster, In Search of Excellence: Lessons From America's Best-Known Companies, by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman Jr. Published in 1982, at a time when corporate America had been shocked out of its complacency by the rise of Japan Inc., In Search reminded readers that American companies such as HP and McDonald's still did some things right. BTL appeared just a year after Michael Hammer and James Champy's Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution became an instant hit with its hard-core message of rethinking a company's processes (widely interpreted as getting rid of human beings).

BTL offered a message of hope and good feeling in an era when horizons seemed limitless: If you could unite your company around a system of core values that everyone actually believed in and goals that were wildly ambitious, you could have great success. "There are three critical success factors [with a business book]," says D'Aveni. "One, tell people what they want to hear and give them hope. Two, make it a Rorschach test, and three, keep it so simple that it really doesn't examine the truth of the world in enough depth so people get a false sense of clarity." BTL, he says, possesses all three.

For every management theory, there is an opposite one that makes as much sense.

Yet if the business-book world is filled with slippery frogs, BTL ends up looking like a relative prince, providing more hard evidence, in the form of historical research and good storytelling, than 99% of the books out there. Here, then, is the downside of writing a book chock-full of real examples: You set yourself up for criticism, because there's actually something there to criticize. It's difficult to do that with many other business best-sellers, such as Spencer Johnson's Who Moved My Cheese?: Certainly no one would bother trying to prove that the mouse was stupid or that the cheese was overripe.

In the end, though, there's this one big rub about management books -- even the best- selling ones and even the ones with plenty of data attached. The world they seek to describe is so complex, so tumultuous, often so random as to defy predictability and even rationality. "If Collins is to be faulted," says James O'Toole, research professor at the Center for Effective Organizations at USC's Marshall School of Business, "it is that he ignores Aristotle's advice not to try to scientifically measure those things that don't lend themselves to quantification." And all the jumble and chaos mean, says Bain's Rigby, that for every management theory, there is an equal and opposite theory that makes just as much sense. "Stick to your knitting, or don't put all your eggs in one basket," he says. "Better to be safe than sorry, but nothing ventured, nothing gained." Perhaps BTL readers would do well to follow the title of chapter seven: Try a Lot of Stuff and Keep What Works. Now there's some business advice worth taking.

Jennifer Reingold is a senior writer and Ryan Underwood a staff writer at Fast Company.