The exciting thing, however, is to figure out why these companies have separated themselves into the special category that we consider highly visionary. How did they begin? How did they manage the various difficult stages of corporate evolution from tiny start-ups to global institutions? And, once they became large, what characteristics did they share in common that distinguished them from other large companies? What can we learn from their development that might prove useful to people who would like to create, build, and maintain such companies? We invite you on a journey through the rest of this book to discover answers to these questions.
We dedicate the second half of this chapter to describing our research process. Then, beginning in Chapter 2, we present our findings, which include a number of surprising and counterintuitive discoveries. As a preview of our findings, we present here a dozen common myths that were shattered during the course of our research.
TWELVE SHATTERED MYTHS
Myth 1: It takes a great idea to start a great company.
Reality: Starting a company with a “great idea” might be a bad idea. Few of the visionary companies began life with a great idea. In fact, some began life without any specific idea and a few even began with outright failures. Furthermore, regardless of the founding concept, the visionary companies were significantly less likely to have early entrepreneurial success than the comparison companies in our study. Like the parable of the tortoise and the hare, visionary companies often get off to a slow start, but win the long race.
Myth 2: Visionary companies require great and charismatic visionary leaders.
Reality: A charismatic visionary leader is absolutely not required for a visionary company and, in fact, can be detrimental to a company’s long-term prospects. Some of the most significant CEOs in the history of visionary companies did not fit the model of the high-profile, charismatic leader—indeed, some explicitly shied away from that model. Like the founders of the United States at the Constitutional Convention, they concentrated more on architecting an enduring institution than on being a great individual leader. They sought to be clock builders, not time tellers. And they have been more this way than CEOs at the comparison companies.
Myth 3: The most successful companies exist first and foremost to maximize profits.
Reality: Contrary to business school doctrine, “maximizing shareholder wealth” or “profit maximization” has not been the dominant driving force or primary objective through the history of the visionary companies. Visionary companies pursue a cluster of objectives, of which making money is only one—and not necessarily the primary one. Yes, they seek profits, but they’re equally guided by a core ideology—core values and sense of purpose beyond just making money. Yet, paradoxically, the visionary companies make more money than the more purely profit-driven comparison companies.
Myth 4: Visionary companies share a common subset of “correct” core values.
Reality: There is no “right” set of core values for being a visionary company. Indeed, two companies can have radically different ideologies, yet both be visionary. Core values in a visionary company don’t even have to be “enlightened” or “humanistic,” although they often are. The crucial variable is not the content of a company’s ideology, but how deeply it believes its ideology and how consistently it lives, breathes, and expresses it in all that it does. Visionary companies do not ask, “What should we value?” They ask, “What do we actually value deep down to our toes?”
Myth 5: The only constant is change.
Reality: A visionary company almost religiously preserves its core ideology—changing it seldom, if ever. Core values in a visionary company form a rock-solid foundation and do not drift with the trends and fashions of the day; in some cases, the core values have remained intact for well over one hundred years. And the basic purpose of a visionary company—its reason for being—can serve as a guiding beacon for centuries, like an enduring star on the horizon. Yet, while keeping their core ideologies tightly fixed, visionary companies display a powerful drive for progress that enables them to change and adapt without compromising their cherished core ideals.
Myth 6: Blue-chip companies play it safe.
Reality: Visionary companies may appear straitlaced and conservative to outsiders, but they’re not afraid to make bold commitments to “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” (BHAGs). Like climbing a big mountain or going to the moon, a BHAG may be daunting and perhaps risky, but the adventure, excitement, and challenge of it grabs people in the gut, gets their juices flowing, and creates immense forward momentum. Visionary companies have judiciously used BHAGs to stimulate progress and blast past the comparison companies at crucial points in history.
Myth 7: Visionary companies are great places to work, for everyone.
Reality: Only those who “fit” extremely well with the core ideology and demanding standards of a visionary company will find it a great place to work. If you go to work at a visionary company, you will either fit and flourish—probably couldn’t be happier—or you will likely be expunged like a virus. It’s binary. There’s no middle ground. It’s almost cult-like. Visionary companies are so clear about what they stand for and what they’re trying to achieve that they simply don’t have room for those unwilling or unable to fit their exacting standards.
Myth 8: Highly successful companies make their best moves by brilliant and complex strategic planning.
Reality: Visionary companies make some of their best moves by experimentation, trial and error, opportunism, and—quite literally—accident. What looks in retrospect like brilliant foresight and preplanning was often the result of “Let’s just try a lot of stuff and keep what works.” In this sense, visionary companies mimic the biological evolution of species. We found the concepts in Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species to be more helpful for replicating the success of certain visionary companies than any textbook on corporate strategic planning.
Myth 9: Companies should hire outside CEOs to stimulate fundamental change.
Reality: In seventeen hundred years of combined life spans across the visionary companies, we found only four individual incidents of going outside for a CEO—and those in only two companies. Home-grown management rules at the visionary companies to a far greater degree than at the comparison companies (by a factor of six). Time and again, they have dashed to bits the conventional wisdom that significant change and fresh ideas cannot come from insiders.
Myth 10: The most successful companies focus primarily on beating the competition.
Reality: Visionary companies focus primarily on beating themselves. Success and beating competitors comes to the visionary companies not so much as the end goal, but as a residual result of relentlessly asking the question “How can we improve ourselves to do better tomorrow than we did today?” And they have asked this question day in and day out—as a disciplined way of life—in some cases for over 150 years. No matter how much they achieve—no matter how far in front of their competitors they pull—they never think they’ve done “good enough.”
Myth 11: You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Reality: Visionary companies do not brutalize themselves with the “Tyranny of the OR”—the purely rational view that says you can have either A OR B, but not both. They reject having to make a choice between stability OR progress; cult-like cultures OR individual autonomy; home-grown managers OR fundamental change; conservative practices OR Big Hairy Audacious Goals; making money OR living according to values and purpose. Instead, they embrace the “Genius of the AND”—the paradoxical view that allows them to pursue both A AND B at the same time.
Myth 12: Companies become visionary primarily through “vision statements.”
Reality: The visionary companies attained their stature not so much because they made visionary pronouncements (although they often did make such pronouncements). Nor did they rise to greatness because they wrote one of the vision, values, purpose, mission, or aspiration statements that have become popular in management today (although they wrote such statements more frequently than the comparison companies and decades before it became fashionable). Creating a statement can be a helpful step in building a visionary company, but it is only one of thousands of steps in a never-ending process of expressing the fundamental characteristics we identified across the visionary companies.
THE RESEARCH PROJECT
Origins: Who Is the Visionary Leader at 3M?
In 1988, we began to wrestle with the question of corporate “vision”: Does it actually exist? If so, what exactly is it? Where does it come from? How do organizations end up doing visionary things? Vision had received much attention in the popular press and among management thinkers, yet we felt highly unsatisfied by what we read.
For one thing, the term “vision” had been tossed around by so many people and used in so many different ways that it created more confusion than clarification. Some viewed vision as about having a crystal-ball picture of the future marketplace. Others thought in terms of a technology or product vision, such as the Macintosh computer. Still others emphasized a vision of the organization—values, purpose, mission, goals, images of an idealized workplace. Talk about a muddled mess! No wonder so many hard-nosed practical businesspeople were highly skeptical of the whole notion of vision; it just seemed so—well—fuzzy, unclear, and impractical.
Furthermore—and what bothered us most—the image of something called a “visionary leader” (often charismatic and high-profile) lurked in the background of nearly all discussions and writings about vision. But, we asked ourselves, if “visionary leadership” is so critical to the development of extraordinary organizations, then who is the charismatic visionary leader of 3M? We didn’t know. Do you? 3M has been a widely admired—almost revered—company for decades, yet few people can even name its current chief executive, or his predecessor, or even his predecessor, and so on.
3M is a company that many would describe as visionary, yet doesn’t seem to have (or have had in its past) an archetypal, high-profile, charismatic visionary leader. We checked into the history of 3M and learned that it had been founded in 1902. So, even if it had a visionary leader in its past, that person would almost certainly have died a long time ago. (In fact, as of 1994, 3M had ten generations of chief executives.) It also became clear that 3M could not possibly trace its success primarily to a visionary product concept, market insight, or lucky break; no such product or lucky break could create nearly one hundred years of corporate performance.
It occurred to us that 3M represented something beyond visionary leadership, visionary products, visionary market insights, or inspiring vision statements. 3M, we decided, could best be described as a visionary company.
And thus we began the extensive research project on which this book is based. In a nutshell, we had two primary objectives for the research project:
1. To identify the underlying characteristics and dynamics common to highly visionary companies (and that distinguish them from other companies) and to translate these findings into a useful conceptual framework.
2. To effectively communicate these findings and concepts so that they influence the practice of management and prove beneficial to people who want to help create, build, and maintain visionary companies.
Step 1: What Companies Should We Study?
Stop and think for a minute. Suppose you wanted to create a list of visionary companies to study. No prior list exists in any literature; the concept of a “visionary company” is new and untested. How might you go about creating a list of companies?
We wrestled with this question and concluded that we, as individuals, should not construct the list. We might have biases that would excessively favor one company over another. We might not know the corporate landscape well enough. We might be partial to California-based or technology-based companies because we’re more familiar with them.
To minimize individual bias, therefore, we elected to survey chief executive officers at leading corporations from a wide range of sizes, industries, types, and geographical locations and ask them to help us create the list of visionary companies to study. We believed that CEOs, given their unique vantage point as practitioners atop leading corporations, would have the most discerning and seasoned judgment in selecting companies. We trusted CEO input more than input from academics because CEOs are in constant touch with the practical challenges and realities of building and managing companies. Leading CEOs, we reasoned, would have excellent working knowledge of the companies in their industry and related industries. We also reasoned that the effective chief executive keeps close tabs on the companies that his or her company works with and competes against.
In August 1989, we surveyed a carefully selected representative sample of seven hundred CEOs from the following populations:
• Fortune 500 industrial companies
• Fortune 500 service companies
• Inc. 500 private companies
• Inc. 100 public companies.
To ensure a representative sample across industries, we selected CEOs from every industry classification in the Fortune 500 listings, both service and industrial (250 from each). The Inc. listings ensured adequate representation from smaller companies, both public and private (we surveyed a representative sample of 200 companies across these two populations). We asked each CEO to nominate up to five companies that he or she perceived to be “highly visionary.” We specifically asked that the CEOs personally respond and to not delegate the response to someone else in their organization.
We received a 23.5 percent response rate from the CEOs (165 cards) with an average of 3.2 companies listed per card. We performed a series of statistical analyses to confirm that we received a representative sample from all target populations.4 In other words, no one group of CEOs dominated the final survey data; we had statistically representative input from all parts of the country and from all types and sizes of companies.5
Using the survey data, we created a list of visionary companies to study by identifying the twenty organizations most frequently mentioned by the CEOs. We then eliminated from the list companies founded after 1950; we reasoned that any company founded before 1950 had proven itself to be more than the beneficiary of a single leader or a single great idea. By rigorously applying the pre-1950 criteria, we culled the final list to eighteen visionary companies to study. The youngest companies in our study were founded in 1945 and the oldest was founded in 1812. At the time of our survey, the companies in our study averaged ninety-two years of age, with an average founding date of 1897 and a median founding date of 1902. (See Table 1.2 for founding dates.)
Step 2: Avoiding the “Discover Buildings” Trap (A Comparison Group)
We could have simply put the visionary companies off in a corral by themselves, studied them, and asked the question “What common characteristics do we see across these companies?” But there is a fundamental flaw in merely pursuing a “common characteristic” analysis.
What would we find if we just looked for common characteristics? Just to use an extreme example, we would discover that all eighteen of the companies have buildings! That’s right; we would find a perfect 100 percent correlation between being a visionary company and having buildings. We would also find a perfect 100 percent correlation between being a visionary company and having desks, and pay systems, and boards of directors, and accounting systems, and—well, you get the idea. We agree that it would be absurd to then conclude that a key factor in being a visionary company is to have buildings. Indeed, all companies have buildings; so discovering that 100 percent of the visionary companies have buildings tells us nothing valuable.
Table 1.2
Founding Dates
| 1812 | Citicorp | |
| 1837 | Procter & Gamble | |
| 1847 | Philip Morris | |
| 1850 | American Express | |
| 1886 | Johnson & Johnson | |
| 1891 | Merck | |
| 1892 | General Electric | |
| 1901 | Nordstrom | |
| Median: | 1902 | 3M |
| 1903 | Ford | |
| 1911 | IBM | |
| 1915 | Boeing | |
| 1923 | Walt Disney | |
| 1927 | Marriott | |
| 1928 | Motorola | |
| 1938 | Hewlett-Packard | |
| 1945 | Sony | |
| 1945 | Wal-Mart | |
Please don’t take our harping on this point the wrong way. We’re not trying to belabor an obvious concept that’s as clear and straightforward to you as it is to us. We’re harping on it because the sad fact is that much business research and writing falls into the “discover buildings” trap. Suppose you study a group of successful companies and you find that they emphasize customer focus, or quality improvement, or empowerment; how do you know that you haven’t merely discovered the management practice equivalent of having buildings? How do you know that you’ve discovered something that distinguishes the successful companies from other companies? You don’t know. You can’t know—not unless you have a control set, a comparison group.
The critical question is not “What’s common across a group of companies?” Rather, the critical issues are: “What’s essentially different about these companies? What distinguishes one set of companies from another?” We therefore concluded that we could only reach our research objectives by studying our visionary companies in contrast to other companies that had a similar start in life.
We systematically and painstakingly selected a comparison company for each visionary company (see Table 1.1 earlier in this chapter for the comparison pairs). We selected the comparison companies using the following criteria:
• Same founding era. In each case, we looked for a comparison company founded in the same era as the visionary company. The comparison companies in our study had an average founding date of 1892 versus 1897 for the visionary companies.
• Similar founding products and markets. In each case, we looked for a comparison company that pursued similar products, services, and markets in its early days. However, the comparison company need not be in precisely the same industry later in its history; we wanted companies that started in the same place, but didn’t necessarily end up in the same place. For example, Motorola (a visionary company) expanded far beyond consumer electronics, whereas Zenith (Motorola’s comparison company) did not; we wanted to see what guided these widely divergent outcomes, even though they had very similar beginnings.
• Fewer mentions in the CEO survey. In each case, we looked for a comparison company that garnered substantially fewer mentions than the visionary company in the CEO survey. Since we relied heavily on the CEOs in our selection of visionary companies, we wanted to rely on the same input in selecting our comparison set.
• Not a dog company. We didn’t want to compare the visionary companies to total failures or poor performers. We believed that a conservative comparison (that is, comparing to other good companies) would give our ultimate findings much more credibility and value. If we compared the visionary companies to a bunch of abysmal failures, we’d certainly find differences, but not helpful differences. If you compare Olympic championship teams to high school teams, you’d certainly see some differences, but would those differences be meaningful? Would they tell you anything valuable? Of course not. But if you compare Olympic gold medal teams with silver or bronze medal teams and find systematic differences, then you’ve got something credible and useful. We wanted to compare gold medal teams to silver and bronze medal teams whenever possible to give real meaning to our findings.
Step 3: History and Evolution
We decided to undertake the daunting task of examining the companies throughout their entire histories. We didn’t just ask “What attributes do these companies have today?” We primarily asked such questions as “How did these companies get started? How did they evolve? How did they negotiate the pitfalls of being small, cash-strapped enterprises? How did they manage the transition from start-up to established corporation? How did they handle transitions from founder to second-generation management? How did they deal with historical events such as wars and depressions? How did they handle the invention of revolutionary new technologies?”
We pursued this historical analysis for three reasons. First, we wanted to glean insights that would be valuable not only to readers in large corporations, but also to people in small to midsize companies. We have practical experience and academic knowledge across the continuum—from entrepreneurship and building small companies to planned organizational change in large corporations—and we wanted to create knowledge and tools that would prove useful from both of these perspectives.
Second, and even more important, we believed that only an evolutionary perspective could lead to understanding the fundamental dynamics behind visionary companies. To use an analogy, you can’t fully understand the United States without understanding its history—the Revolutionary War, the ideals and compromises of the Constitutional Convention, the Civil War, the expansion westward, the cataclysmic national Depression of the 1930s, the influence of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, and many other historical factors. In our view, corporations resemble nations in that they reflect the accumulation of past events and the shaping force of underlying genetics that have roots in prior generations.
How could we possibly understand Merck today without examining the origins of its underlying philosophy laid down by George Merck in the 1920s (“Medicine is for the patient; not for the profits. The profits follow”)? How could we possibly understand 3M today without examining the fact that it began life nearly bankrupt as a failed mine? How could we possibly understand General Electric under the stewardship of Jack Welch without examining GE’s systematic leadership development and selection processes that trace back to the early 1900s? How could we possibly understand Johnson & Johnson’s response to the Tylenol poisoning crisis in the 1980s without examining the historical roots of the J&J Credo (penned in 1943) that guided the company’s response to the crisis? We couldn’t.
Third, we believed our comparison analysis would be much more powerful from a historical perspective. Just looking at the visionary versus comparison companies in current time would be like merely watching the last thirty seconds of a marathon footrace. Sure, you could see who won the gold medal, but you wouldn’t understand why he or she had won. To fully understand the outcome of a race, you have to see the entire race and the events that led up to it—to look at the various runners during their training, during their prerace preparations, during mile one, mile two, mile three, and so on. Similarly, we wanted to look back in time to find answers to such intriguing questions as:
• How did Motorola successfully move from a humble battery repair business into car radios, television, semiconductors, integrated circuits, and cellular communications, while Zenith—started at the same time with similar resources—never became a major player in anything other than TVs?
• How did Procter & Gamble continue to thrive 150 years after its founding, while most companies are lucky to survive even 15 years? And how did P&G, which began life substantially behind rival Colgate, eventually prevail as the premier institution in its industry?
• How did Hewlett-Packard Company remain healthy and vibrant after Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard stepped aside, while Texas Instruments—once a high-flying darling of Wall Street—nearly self-destructed after Pat Haggarty stepped aside?
• Why did Walt Disney Company become an American icon, surviving and prospering through hostile takeover attempts, while Columbia Pictures slowly lost ground, never became an icon, and eventually sold out to a Japanese company?
• How did Boeing emerge from obscurity in the commercial aircraft industry and unseat McDonnell Douglas as the premier commercial aircraft company in the world; what did Boeing have in the 1950s that McDonnell Douglas lacked?
UNCOVERING TIMELESS PRINCIPLES Can we legitimately draw conclusions by looking at history? Can we learn anything useful from looking at what companies did ten, thirty, fifty, or one hundred years ago? Certainly the world has changed dramatically—and will continue to change. The specific methods used by these companies in the past may not directly apply to the future. We acknowledge this. But throughout our research we kept looking for underlying, timeless, fundamental principles and patterns that might apply across eras. For example, the specific methods visionary companies use to “preserve the core and stimulate progress” (a key principle discussed throughout the book) will continue to evolve, but the underlying principle itself is timeless—equally valid and essential in 1850 as 1900, 1950, and 2050. Our goal has been to use the long range of corporate history to gain understanding and develop concepts and tools that will be useful in preparing organizations to be visionary in the twenty-first century and beyond.
INDEED, if we had to identify one aspect of this book that most separates it from all previous management books, we would point to the fact that we looked at companies throughout their entire life spans and in direct comparison to other companies. This proved to be the key method for calling into question powerfully entrenched myths and discerning fundamental principles that apply over long stretches of time and across a wide range of industries.
Step 4: Crates of Data, Months of Coding, and “Tortoise Hunting”
Once we’d selected our companies and decided on the historical and comparison method, we faced another difficult problem: Precisely what should we examine over the history of the companies? Should we examine corporate strategy? Organization structure? Management? Culture? Values? Systems? Product lines? Industry conditions? Since we didn’t know ahead of time what factors would explain the enduring stature of the visionary companies, we couldn’t pursue a narrow research focus; we had to gather evidence across a wide range of dimensions.
Throughout our research, we kept in mind the image of Charles Darwin taking his five-year voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle, exploring the Galapagos Islands, and stumbling across huge tortoises (among other species) that varied from island to island. These unexpected observations planted a seed that provoked his thinking during his ride home on the Beagle and during his subsequent work in England. Darwin had the opportunity to gain new insights in part because he had the good fortune of unexpected observations. He wasn’t looking specifically for variations in tortoises, yet there they were—these big, waddling, weird-looking tortoises wandering around the islands and not fitting neatly into prior assumptions about species.6 We, too, wanted to stumble into a few unexpected, weird-looking tortoises that might provoke our thinking.
Of course, we wanted to be much more systematic than just wandering around aimlessly, hoping to randomly bump into a tortoise or two. To ensure systematic and comprehensive data collection, we employed a framework based on a technique called “Organization Stream Analysis” for collecting and sorting information.7 Using this framework, our research team gathered and tracked nine categories of information over the entire history of each company. (See Table A.1 in Appendix 3.) These categories encompassed virtually all aspects of a corporation, including organization, business strategy, products and services, technology, management, ownership structure, culture, values, policies, and the external environment. As part of this effort, we systematically analyzed annual financial statements back to the year 1915 and monthly stock returns back to the year 1926. In addition, we did an overview of general and business history in the United States from 1800 to 1990, and an overview of each industry represented by the companies in our study.
To gather information for thirty-six separate companies over an average life span of ninety-plus years, we sourced nearly a hundred books and over three thousand individual documents (articles, case studies, archive materials, corporate publications, video footage). As a conservative estimate, we reviewed over sixty thousand pages of material (the actual number is probably closer to a hundred thousand pages). The documents for this project filled three shoulder-height file cabinets, four bookshelves, and twenty megabytes of computer storage space for financial data and analyses. (Table A.2 in Appendix 3 outlines our sources.)
Step 5: Harvesting the Fruits of our Labor
Next came the most difficult task of the entire project. We distilled the nearly overwhelming amount of information (much of it qualitative) down to a few key concepts linked together in a framework—a set of conceptual hooks on which to hang and organize the rich detail and supporting evidence from our research. We looked for repeating patterns and sought to identify underlying trends and forces; we aimed to identify those concepts that would explain the historical trajectory of the visionary companies and would provide practical guidance to managers building their companies for the twenty-first century.
The underlying backbone of our findings comes from comparison analyses. Throughout our work, we kept coming back to the primary question “What separates the visionary companies from the comparison companies over the long course of history?” As you read the book, you’ll find reference to tables in Appendix 3 where we methodically compared the visionary companies to the comparison companies on a given dimension.
We also combined this analytic comparison process with creative processes. We wanted to break as free as possible from the constraining dogmas of business schools and the popular management press. In particular, we sought to stimulate our thinking with ideas that had nothing, on the surface, to do with business and merged these with observations from our research. We therefore read extensively from nonbusiness disciplines: biology (especially evolutionary theory), genetics, psychology, social psychology, sociology, philosophy, political science, history, and cultural anthropology.
Step 6: Field Testing and Application in the Real World
Throughout the entire research project, we continually tested our findings and concepts by throwing them into the teeth of hard reality via consulting engagements and board of directors responsibilities. At the time of this writing, we have personally applied frameworks and tools based on our research at over thirty separate organizations, ranging from young companies with less than $10 million in revenue to multibillion-dollar Fortune 500 corporations across a wide range of industries, including those in computers, health care, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, construction, retailing, mail order, sporting goods, electronic instruments, semiconductors, computer software, movie theater chains, environmental engineering, chemicals, and commercial banking. Working with senior management, usually at the direct request of the CEO, we were able to expose our ideas to some of the most incisive, practical, demanding, and hard-nosed people in business.
This “trial by fire” provided a valuable feedback loop that helped us to continually improve our concepts as we moved through the research. For example, during a working session at a pharmaceutical firm, an executive asked, “Are there ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ core values? In other words, does the content of core values count the most, or does the authenticity and consistency of core values—whatever the content—count the most? Is there any particular subset of core values that show up across all visionary companies?” We then returned to our research data and systematically answered these questions (see Chapter 3), thus completing the loop from research to practice and back again (see Figure 1.A). This looping process occurred many times across a wide range of issues during the five-year period of the research project and contributed greatly to this book.
LET THE EVIDENCE SPEAK
All research projects in the social sciences suffer from inherent limitations and difficulties, and ours is no exception. For one thing, we cannot perform controlled, repeatable experiments where we hold all but one critical variable constant and assess various outcomes from tweaking that variable. We would love to make petri dishes of corporations, but we can’t; we have to take what history gives us and make the best of it. In Appendix 1 at the end of this book, we’ve described a variety of concerns—and our responses to those concerns—that a critical reader might raise about our research methodology.
Figure 1.A
Feedback Loop
Nonetheless, even taking full account of those concerns, the sheer volume of information we examined combined with the continual looping process from research to theory to practice gives us confidence that our conclusions are reasonable and—perhaps most important—helpful to the development of outstanding organizations. We do not claim to have found Truth with a capital T. No one in the social sciences can claim that. But we do claim that this research has given us better understanding of organizations and better conceptual tools for building outstanding companies than we had before.
We now turn to share the findings of our work. We hope you drink deeply from this book, for the history of these companies can teach us much. But, at the same time, we hope you think critically and objectively as you read; we would rather that you thoughtfully consider and ultimately reject our findings than that you blindly and unquestioningly accept them. Let the evidence speak for itself. You’re the judge and jury.
* We used 1950 as the cutoff date in the study. You could also use a fifty-year minimum age cutoff.