I’m a fan of the Jim Collin’s books “Built to Last” and “Good to Great” for some of the lessons within including:
- Getting the flywheel spinning – great companies are built by the marathon effort of being excellent every day and improving every day
- Get the right people on the bus - businesses are only as good as their people and the will to win those people have.
But as Chris Dixon points out in his excellent post today, you can’t just read the Collins books (or any other book for that matter) and become one of the truly great. Why? Because the part that Collins can’t sell you is insight and intuition. No book, focus group, spreadsheet or research study replaces the unique genius that is the insight to see what the future holds – to bring customers what you know they will want, not what they know to ask for.
As Chris mentions, one of the companies featured in Built to Last is Circuit City – a company that is now bankrupt. Circuit City was likely quite good at running an offline electronics retailer. But that turned out to be a skill of increasingly limited value. Along came the Internet, pervasive PCs, Amazon, Fed-Ex (inexpensive 2 day shipping), easy price comparison, and there went their business. Amazon is worth $41 billion and growing and the Circuit City store at 80th and Broadway in Manhattan has a store for-rent sign in the window.
As evidenced by the layoffs at Conde Nast (CN) this past week, the magazine business is facing the same problem. In a world of targeted and trackable marketing and distribution of content via servers and electrons on fiber, CN is a business built on untrackable generalized impressions in magazines, printing presses, trucks, paper stock decisions, and multi hundred thousand dollar photo shoots for covers. How long is it before the Conde Nast building at 4 Times Square has its own for rent sign in the window? It’s not a foregone conclusion that it will happen but it will take some aggressive changes on the part of an organization that has become wedded to a defunct business model to right a listing ship. The future of Conde Nast is far less Anna Wintour and Graydon Carter and far more Nick Denton – if not necessarily in the type and nature of content being produced (I enjoy VF), then certainly in the approach to management and strategy. But it won’t happen by cost cutting the old business model alone – as a board member of a prior company said to me once – “you can’t heat your house by burning the shingles off the roof”. No amount of cost cutting will save Conde Nast – instead they have to figure out a new way to exist and grow in a world that has changed. As Ariel said to me a few days ago “no amount of cost cutting would have saved the steam engine lines (boats) – they needed to learn how to fly planes instead”.
Of course, seeing the future is not enough – you also have to be able to create it as well. Saying “we should build a cool looking phone that surfs the internet well” is not useful unless you can also design it, build it, manufacture it, market it, etc. Vision without execution only ends with great grandkids saying “my grandfather should have bought Manhattan when it cost a dollar”. That’s where Collin’s books can be useful. But as Chris says, life is not fair – not everyone has insight and insight is what truly separates.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_a.png?x-id=e0578650-deef-488e-a07e-ada2a810eb20)
