Enduring Success: What We Can Learn from the History of Outstanding Corporations - Hardcover

Stadler, Christian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804772215 ISBN 13: 9780804772211

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Enduring Success addresses a key question in business today: How can companies succeed over time? To learn the source of enduring greatness, author Christian Stadler directed a team of eight researchers in a six-year study of some of Europe's oldest and most stellar companies, targeting nine that have survived for more than 100 years and have significantly outperformed the market over the past fifty years. Readers may wonder, "Why European companies?" Yet, Europe is the ideal place to seek the key to long-term success; half of the Fortune Global 500 companies that are 100 years old or older can be found in Europe, as can 72 of the 100 oldest family businesses in the world.

Fifteen years after Collins and Porras' Built to Last, this new book incorporates fresh insights from management science and provides the first non-US perspective on long-range success. Through Stadler's study, a counterintuitive story emerges: the greatest companies adapt to a constantly changing environment by being intelligently conservative. Enduring Success provides a coherent framework, grounded in five principles and practical concepts, for business leaders who are prepared to learn from the history of some of the world's greatest institutions. Please visit the author's YouTube channel www.youtube.com/user/StadlerChristian for more discussion of the book.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

For the past decade, Christian Stadler has investigated long-living corporations—how they grow, adapt, and consistently beat their competitors. He has shared his ideas with executives and students in Asia, Australia, Europe, and the US. Currently, he teaches strategy at the University of Bath. His work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review and Fast Company.

For the past decade, Christian Stadler has investigated long-living corporations—how they grow, adapt, and consistently beat their competitors. He has shared his ideas with executives and students in Asia, Australia, Europe, and the US. Currently, he teaches strategy at the University of Bath. His work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review and Fast Company.

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Enduring Success

What We Can Learn from the History of Outstanding CorporationsBy Christian Stadler

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7221-1

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments............................................................ix1. The Quest for Enduring Success......................................................12. WHAT—A Framework for Enduring Success.........................................233. HOW—Strategies to Implement the Framework.....................................434. WHO—A Commentary on Leadership................................................1485. SO WHAT?—A Comparison with Prior Studies......................................1646. Epilogue: Learning from the History of Outstanding Corporations.....................170Appendix A: Brief Histories of Gold and Silver Medalists...............................177Appendix B: Methodology and Selection of Comparison Companies..........................203Notes..................................................................................217References.............................................................................237Index..................................................................................251

Chapter One

THE QUEST FOR ENDURING SUCCESS

There is no such thing as perpetual success.

Life is a constant struggle and we would be fools if we made ourselves believe that some people always succeed. To be honest, life would be dull and boring if we did not face occasional struggles. Success, after all, is a relative experience—relative not only to failure but also to the mediocre and mundane. Overcoming major barriers is part of the fun and makes victory so much sweeter.

For corporations the story is very much the same. At this writing, the world is struggling through a severe financial crisis. This has happened before, of course, and it's a reminder that cycles of boom and bust are endemic to capitalism. A few years ago, following the burst of the New Economy bubble, shareholders, managers, and employees went through similar motions when they became painfully aware that the promise of easy riches remained just that, a promise. What most experienced hands had known all along became obvious to the general public once again: companies that we celebrate one day might stumble and fall before the sun rises again. Armed with natural curiosity, most of us would like to know whether things really have to be that way. Is there the occasional company that avoids or defers this fate? A company our great- grandparents were able to admire? A company we can admire today and feel reasonably confident will be still around when our great-grandchildren grow old?

Brooding on these issues after the completion of my doctoral dissertation, I made a trip to Guildford, a small town an hour outside London, early in 2002. I had been looking forward to this trip, as I was going to meet Arie de Geus, the former head of Shell Planning, who had published a celebrated book on long-lived companies. Arie, I was sure, could answer my questions. But as is often the case with experienced senior managers who move beyond daily operations and reach a certain state of wisdom, Arie raised more questions than he answered. He made it quite clear that we know very little about the long-term development of large organizations. Other than Arie's book, there is only Jim Collins and Jerry Porras's best-selling Built to Last (1994), which concentrates on long-lasting corporations. While their work is on U.S. companies, there is no comparable research on European companies, some of which happen to be older than their American cousins due to the different timing of the arrival of industrialization on different continents. European companies therefore remain generally (or relatively) unexplored, and a detailed analysis of them is bound to add to our understanding of how corporations may develop over time.

I am not sure if it was Arie's intention, but he managed to plant the seed for this book. Although I started to work for a large strategy consultancy in Germany shortly after our get-together in Guildford, the questions continued to haunt me. In the summer of 2003 I finally decided that the subject deserved more than a little thought. I returned to the University of Innsbruck to join the strategy department and set up a team to explore long-term success in Europe. Some of the world's leading experts on the subject, such as Arie, Jerry Porras, and the distinguished (now deceased) historian Alfred D. Chandler, agreed to advise us. With their help we were ready to attack three main questions:

How is it possible for some companies to succeed for more than 100 years?

What distinguishes these companies from others that fall by the wayside?

What can we learn from the experiences of these long-lived companies?

Corporate Landscape in Europe

Before the team felt justified in leaping into the specifics of the project, we wanted to gain an overview of the genealogy of European corporations. How old is the average corporation in Europe? Is there a relationship between success and age? The apparent simplicity of these two questions is misleading. First of all, it is not all that easy to determine exactly what constitutes a company. Some large corporations actually consist of scores, even hundreds, of small companies. In each case where one firm owns a controlling interest in a second firm, we considered it to be one company. There are also companies where a family or an entrepreneur owns a controlling interest in other companies, and therefore what appear to be separate and independent organizations in reality should be considered as one unit. Unfortunately, the structure of the publicly accessible data makes the consolidation of the family-owned firms impossible.

A second issue concerning publicly available data is related to the registration of corporations. Rules in different European countries vary, but in general small corporations run by an individual are not required to sign up in the public registry. This creates a distortion in the data set, as smaller companies are missing.

A third issue has to do with mergers and acquisitions. Following a merger, companies sometimes register as a new corporation. For example, DaimlerChrysler appeared as a new firm after the merger in 1999, although Gottlieb Daimler started with the production of automobiles in the late 19th century.

Despite these concerns, it is possible to draw a relatively robust picture of the age of European corporations today. We used the Amadeus database, a platform that aggregates data from local companies, compiling records from public registrars. In 2005 the database listed more than 7 million companies based in Western Europe. Of the total, 2.4 million companies were classified as independent corporations in which no shareholder accounted for more than 25 percent of direct or total ownership. In such a large sample the effect of a family's controlling apparently independent organizations and the new registration of some companies following a merger bears limited statistical significance. The same is true for the sample of 3,139 publicly traded companies. For the 238 companies with more than 10,000 employees and the 154 companies with a market capitalization of more than $5 billion, we...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804772215
• ISBN 13: 9780804772211
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 280
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland