Built to last, a life that works

Fast Company has posted a very interesting article by Jim Collins, author of the 1994 bestseller “Built to Last”. As Jim says it: “In the built-to-flip world, the notion of investing persistent effort in order to build a great company seems, well, quaint, unnecessary — even stupid.” As you read the article though you start to understand that, instead of getting in and cashing out, there is often a better and more profitable way to approach entrepreneurship.

The essence of building something to last “lies in people’s dedication to building companies around a sense of purpose — around core values that infuse work with the kind of meaning that goes beyond just making money.” And Jim shows that the end result of building something to last is that you often make a whole lot more money. He cites Walmart’s Sam Walton: “picture Walton collecting a wheelbarrow full of cash from flipping his first store after 18 months, rather than building a company whose annual revenues now exceed $130 billion.”

As always, the better way may be harder, but it has its own rewards. I highly recommend reading the whole article because it outlines how the build to flip trend got started, as well as illustrates that there are some businesses that actually shouldn’t be built to last. Check out this great quote:

In the old Silicon Valley paradigm, “fast” meant flipping a company within 7 to 10 years. By today’s standards, that time frame seems preposterously glacial. Fortune Systems aside, most people operating within the old Silicon Valley paradigm at least gave lip service to the idea of creating a great company — of inventing products that make a significant contribution and then building a sustainable economic engine around those products. People are now proselytizing the bizarre notion that it’s better not to have profits: Today’s upside-down logic says that a company will get a better valuation if it has nothing but upside potential — because the casino players care about nothing else. In a recent column in the “New York Times,” technology writer Denise Caruso described the phenomenon: “The desire to cash out big is not a new motivating force in the technology industry. But what is striking about today’s Internet economy is how much of that money lust is focused on selling business plans for their own sake, rather than planning viable businesses.”

Lastly, Jim mixes in a little Zen to remind us what it’s all about anyway:

If the new economy is to regain its soul, we need to ask ourselves some tough questions: Are we committed to doing our work with unadulterated excellence, no matter how arduous the task or how long the road? Is our work likely to make a contribution that we can be proud of? Does our work provide us with a sense of purpose and meaning that goes beyond just making money?

If we cannot answer yes to those questions, then we’re failing, no matter how much money we make. But if we can answer yes, then we’re likely not only to attain financial success but also to gain that rarest of all achievements: a life that works.