Top 7 Ways To Make A Good To Great Company Last

According to the author of Good to Great and Built to Last , Jim Collins, "Good to Great is not a sequel to Built to Last, but more of a prequel. Good to Great is about how to turn a good organization into one that produces sustained great results. Built to Last is about how you take a company with great results and turn it into an enduring great company of iconic stature." Good to great companies must be visionary for them to stand the test of time.

These companies can be built to last using the following guiding principles of a visionary company:

1. Be Clock Builders Not Time-Tellers. Leaders of visionary companies regard their greatest creation as the organization itself and what it stands for. They concentrate on strengthening the organization to stand the test of time.
   
   
2. Embrace the "And" Reject the "Or". Visionary companies do not choose A over B; instead, they find a way to do both A and B and profit from it.
   
   
3. Visionary Companies are More Than a Profit. Visionary Companies exist not only for making money but beyond that; they are guided by their core ideology, core values, the sense of purpose and mission.
   
   
4. Visionary Companies Walk the Talk. Visionary companies make the ideology pervasive throughout the company by indoctrinating and creating cultures around the ideology; by choosing leadership and management that role-model the ideology; and by seeking alignment of functional goals, strategies and organization design around the core ideology.
   
   
5. Preserve the Core Ideology While Stimulating Progress. A visionary company carefully preserves and protects its core ideology while changing practices and strategies.
   
   
6. Recognize That Being a Visionary Company Is a Never- Ending Process. Visionary companies restlessly strive for progress and have their core ideologies open to evolution and change.
   
   
7. Build the Vision. Visionary Companies have a written vision statement. Writing a vision statement is only one of thousands of things visionary companies do to be visionary.

Garrett Smith graduated from Brigham Young University with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering in April of 2005. Since then he has been pursuing his life's dream of starting and owning his own business. Currently, Garrett resides in Salt Lake City Utah and works primarily as a web designer/entrepreneur. Garrett, an ardent booklover, created BookJive.com as a free book summaries wiki to help other booklovers communicate, discuss, and share invaluable information contained in the world's books.