JAMES C. COLLINS

He aquí un libro que destruye mitos, presenta nuevos conceptos y ofrece una guía práctica para todos aquellos que deseen crear compañías de vanguardia que resistan la prueba del tiempo. Después de seis años de investigacion en un proyecto de la Graduate School of Business de la Universidad de Stanford, los autores escogieron a dieciocho de las compañias mas longevas de la actualidad y las estudiaron una a una en comparacion directa con sus mas destacadas competidoras, examinandolas desde sus comienzos hasta la epoca presente -en sus inicios, como medianas empresas y como grandes corporaciones- y preguntandose al final: ¿Que hace a estas compañias, verdaderamente excepcionales, distintas de las demas? ¿Que distingue de sus rivales a General Motors, 3M, Merck, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, Walt Disney y Philip Morris? ¿Como pudo Motorola pasar de un humilde negocio de reparacion de baterias a los circuitos integrados y las comunicaciones celulares, mientras que Zenith nunca pudo ir mas alla del campo de la television? ¿Por que desplazo Boeing a McDonnell-Douglas como la mejor compañia de aviones comerciales del mundo? En respuesta a estas preguntas, Collins y Porras van mas alla de los lugares comunes, los topicos y las modas, para lanzarse a descubrir las cualidades que han distinguido siempre a las compañias mas importantes, destruyendo de este modo la falsa pero muy difundida idea de que solo los lideres carismaticos y visionarios pueden crear empresas de caracter vanguardista. Repleto de ejemplos concretos y organizado segun una atractiva estructura de referencias cruzadas y conceptos practicos, Empresas que perduran acaba siendo, asi, una insustituible guia para crear organizaciones capaces de prosperar durante todo el siglo XXI y aun mas alla.

Fundamentally altering the way executives think about long-term success, Built to Last has become a bible among CEOs and managers at prestigious corporations the world over. Using examples from such companies as Wal-Mart, 3M, P&G, and Johnson & Johnson, two professors at the Stanford Graduate School of Business conclude that vision is endemic to an organizations success. Comparisons with a list of also-rans-Pfizer, Ames, Norton, Colgate, Bristol Meyers, and Zenith-helped the authors to prove their central idea: visionary companies can stimulate progress while preserving their core businesses; they can sustain a sense of cultism, create BHAGs (big, hairy, audacious goals), and use unplanned progress to be successful year after year. aThis new edition features an introduction by the authors, describing what theyve learned since the original publication about how their findings apply to international settings, nonprofits, corporations in need of transformation, and making predictions for the future.

The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the worlds greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others dont. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. Some of the key concepts discerned in the study, comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people. Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?