IF you are involved in building and managing an organization, the single most important point to take away from this book is the critical importance of creating tangible mechanisms aligned to preserve the core and stimulate progress. This is the essence of clock building.
Indeed, if we had to distill our six-year research project into one key concept that conveys the most information about what it takes to build a visionary company, we would draw the following icon, which will appear atop all of the remaining chapters:
In the chapters that follow, we will describe the specific methods of preserving the core and stimulating progress that distinguished the visionary companies from the comparison companies, capped by a concluding chapter on alignment. They fall into five categories:
• Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs): Commitment to challenging, audacious—and often risky—goals and projects toward which a visionary company channels its efforts (stimulates progress).
• Cult-like Cultures: Great places to work only for those who buy in to the core ideology; those who don’t fit with the ideology are ejected like a virus (preserves the core).
• Try a Lot of Stuff and Keep What Works: High levels of action and experimentation—often unplanned and undirected—that produce new and unexpected paths of progress and enables visionary companies to mimic the biological evolution of species (stimulates progress).
• Home-grown Management: Promotion from within, bringing to senior levels only those who’ve spent significant time steeped in the core ideology of the company (preserves the core).
• Good Enough Never Is: A continual process of relentless self-improvement with the aim of doing better and better, forever into the future (stimulates progress).
We will provide examples, anecdotes, and systematic evidence to support and illustrate each of these methods. As you read each of these chapters, we encourage you to use our overall framework as a guide for diagnosing your own organization:
• Has it made the shift in perspective from time telling to clock building?
• Does, it reject the “Tyranny of the OR” and embrace the “Genius of the AND”?
• Does it have a core ideology—core values and purpose beyond just making money?
• Does it have a drive for progress—an almost primal urge for change and forward movement in all that is not part of the core ideology?
• Does it preserve the core and stimulate progress through tangible practices, such as Big Hairy Audacious Goals, home-grown management, and the others described throughout the remainder of this book?
• Is the organization in alignment, so that people receive a consistent set of signals to reinforce behavior that supports the core ideology and achieves desired progress?
When you finish reading the next six chapters, you should have a sizable mental list of specific, tangible things that might make sense for you to implement in your own organization to make it more visionary. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a CEO, manager, individual contributor, or entrepreneur. You can put these ideas to work.
* IBM’s three basic beliefs are: Give full consideration to the individual employee, spend a lot of time making customers happy, and go the last mile to do things right.