Built to Last - Jim Collins - ***

Visionary companies are only great places to work for the people who fit in. Everyone else is quickly expelled.
Visionary companies focus on outdoing themselves, not the competition.
Visionary companies make AND choices instead of OR choices.
A visionary company is its own harshest critic.

Time telling vs. clock building: it's a fallacy to respect the guy who always knows what time it is more than the guy who can build a clock for others to use
In countries with kings, the prosperity of the country largely depended on the king.

The success of your company is not the same as the success of your idea.

Wal-Mart let department managers run their department as if it were a business. Cash rewards and public recognition were given to employees who came up with money-saving solutions that could be replicated at other stores.

The Newtonian revolution: the idea God set up a universe with specific principles vs. God's manually making everything happen

Merck's philosophy was that medicine is for the people, not the profits. The profits follow.
Pfizer diversified, saying "I would rather make 5% of $1 billion in total sales than 10% of $300 million in drugs."
-- it's funny, Pfizer's quote brings up the same point I made when I read Good to Great
-- even though Pfizer is the "comparison company", not the "visionary company", its earnings are over double Merck's in '07, and its profits are almost 5 times higher

Hewlett-Packard wanted to contribute something to the world. Texas Instruments wanted to become a giant company. When TI switched to making calculators and cheap digital watches in a "more is better" strategy, Hewlett-Packard had the same opportunity, but HP elected not to take it because it allowed no opportunity for technological contribution.
-- that's kind of cool: if your strength is knowledge, you'll do better if you concentrate on knowledge and let others compete over manufacturing

During the Depression, Motorola was pressured to lie about their financial health. The founder responded that he didn't care about industry practices. "Tell them the truth," he said, "first because it's the right thing to do and second because they'll find out anyway."
The visionary companies are not purely pragmatic or purely idealistic. They are both.

The core ideology of a business needs to be what that business believes, not what it would like itself to believe.
The very act of stating an ideology influences behavior toward consistency with that ideology.

Commit to it or get rid of it.

3M didn't pay lip service to encouraging individual initiative and innovation; it decentralized, gave researchers 15% paid time to pursue any project of their liking, created an internal venture capital fund, and instituted a rule that 25% of each division's annual sales should come from products introduced in the previous five years.

Big Hairy Audacious Goal: the visionary companies rose to success by taking on massive challenges with unreasonable confidence
Procter & Gamble's explanation: "We like to try the impractical and possible and prove it to be both practical and possible -- if it's the right thing to do in the first place. You do something you think is right. If it clicks, you give it a ride. If you hit, mortgage the farm and go for broke."

Cult-like companies: the visionary companies are notable for their
- fervently held ideology
- indoctrination
- tightness of fit (buy in or get out)
- elitism
To create this atmosphere, the companies tailor training, punishment, and rewards to meet the ideology. Emphasis on the ideology is continued, and corporate culture and incentives are provided to produce psychological buy-in.

Procter of Procter & Gamble concluded that workers who showed indifference to the need for a greater work effort should be deprived of their share of the profits - that their shares should be turned over to those who cared. He set up four classifications, based on the degree of a worker's cooperation as decided by management. That helped considerably [to ensure the proper attitude]