Transformation Framework: Vision - What Comes After Great Performance

With an understanding of how to apply our unified transformation framework, we can briefly describe the concepts in Collins’ and Porras’ Built to Last. These concepts provide descriptors of corporations in a post-transformation state, which have long exhibited outstanding performance and made a substantial social contribution. Like great corporations, visionary corporations expose a number of myths regarding what we might think high-performing enterprises’ traits are. Similarly, it is important to note these concepts should be pursued in earnest after GTG-associated steps. It is for this reason we have left a discussion of BTL for last. That being said, as we illustrated in the previous chapter, the reader may not how some characteristics of visionary companies are reflected in GTG-based initiatives and might help them take hold in your organization.

CLOCK BUILDING NOT TIME-TELLING

The first lesson of visionary corporations is that adaptation is more important than a great idea.[1] In fact, all now-visionary corporations started small; their founders only wanting to start a small specific business and lacked a grandiose idea, if the business was driven by an idea at all. For example Hewlett-Packard started with typing parts, Disney only had one short movie, and Texas Instruments started as a seismograph analysis company.[2] These hardly represent the market base for a multi-billion dollar conglomerate. However, this was actually for the better.?“Waiting for a great idea is a bad idea.”[3] Having a great idea actually makes initial entrepreneurial success less likely. The idea shifts attention away from seeing the organization as the creation and the real sustainer of success.[4] It also tends to distract from a pragmatic approach.

Visionary corporations saw products as the vehicle for the company not the other way around.[5] This had an effect not unlike CBF or COD; founders and leaders were always prepared to kill and idea but never gave up on the company. Here an “architectural approach” indicates the same trend. [6] There has to be an organizational approach to long-term success. Improvement must be constantly pursued.?Similarly, the combination of these traits seems to have led then-start-up corporations to a HC quicker than others.

Visionary corporations also lacked a charismatic leader. CEOs of visionary corporations exhibited L5L-like traits – humble, modest, highly persistent, and a good listener.[7] Seeking a high profile typically competed with and was destructive to a visionary organization.[8] This paradox in personal traits was also embodied in the organization, which avoided the “Tyranny of the ‘Or’.”[9] While conventional wisdom would suggest it is wise to choose between desirable product traits for the sake of strategy and focus, visionary organizations did not accept this. Rather, they embraced the “genius of the ‘and’.”[10] They embraced change and fostered stability; they were conservative and bold; produced low cost and high quality products.

[1] Last, 24.

[2] Last, 24.

[3] Last, 27.

[4] Last, 27.

[5] Last, 28.

[6] Last, 34.

[7] Last, 32.

[8] Last, 34.

[9] Last, 43.

[10] Last, 44.