Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies is a business management book written by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras and published in 1994 by HarperBusiness. It reports the results of a six-year research project into what allows companies to remain great over long periods. The authors set out to identify characteristics shared by highly visionary companies and to communicate their findings in a way that could influence how managers work.

To define a "visionary" company, the authors required it to be a premier institution in its industry, widely admired by well-informed businesspeople, to have left a mark on the world, to have had several generations of chief executives, to have gone through multiple product or service life cycles, and to have been founded before 1950. The list of eighteen companies was built from a survey of one thousand CEOs, with representation across industries and sizes, and each company was compared with a less successful rival. The authors acknowledge that their findings show a correlation rather than a proven causal link.

The book's key ideas include building an institution that lasts rather than relying on a single great leader, rejecting the false choice between two options, finding a purpose beyond profit, preserving core values while changing everything else, setting bold and ambitious goals, cultivating a strong culture, trying many initiatives and keeping what works, and promoting leaders from within. It proved highly influential among executives and entrepreneurs, and its authors went on to write further books, including Good to Great (2001).

The book has also drawn criticism. Phil Rosenzweig cites it as an example of the illusion of rigorous research common in business literature, arguing that much of its data is distorted by the halo effect. Several of the companies it profiled later declined significantly. Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, argued that luck plays a large role in business outcomes, though defenders of the book reply that luck does not explain every difference observed.