On his book Enduring Success: What We Can Learn from the History of Outstanding Corporations
Cover Interview of February 07, 2011
The wide angle
I was always fascinated by the richness of history—and greatly frustrated that companies often spend millions on strategy evaluations without learning from their past experience or studying what they and other companies did in comparable past situations.
At rare occasions we remember that we can learn a lot from history. For example, in the past couple of years many scholars, commentators, and politicians have drawn attention to lessons to be learnt from the Great Depression or the Asian Financial Crisis.
I think that we can leverage history much more often. And my book is an attempt to do exactly this.
I selected 9 companies that outperformed stock markets by at least the factor 15 over the past 50 years, and that have been around for more than 100 years—and matched each of them with a comparison company that did well but not quite as well.
With the help of 8 researchers, I then collected vast amounts of information related to these companies. We focused primarily on written accounts about the history of top and comparison companies, on material from their corporate archives, and on interviews with top executives, including 19 active and retired CEOs and chairmen.
As we compared the different histories, we slowly started to develop interpretations. It was a step-by-step process. For example, by comparing Shell and BP a certain idea would emerge. We then tested whether this interpretation would also work for the other companies we studied. Only those ideas that held across the board made it into the book.
No doubt, others might interpret our empirical material differently. But by carefully presenting the stories, the book provides the reader with both a compelling interpretation and an opportunity to make his or her own judgments. Hopefully this will encourage others to use history as a source for business insights.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
The wide angle
I was always fascinated by the richness of history—and greatly frustrated that companies often spend millions on strategy evaluations without learning from their past experience or studying what they and other companies did in comparable past situations.
At rare occasions we remember that we can learn a lot from history. For example, in the past couple of years many scholars, commentators, and politicians have drawn attention to lessons to be learnt from the Great Depression or the Asian Financial Crisis.
I think that we can leverage history much more often. And my book is an attempt to do exactly this.
I selected 9 companies that outperformed stock markets by at least the factor 15 over the past 50 years, and that have been around for more than 100 years—and matched each of them with a comparison company that did well but not quite as well.
With the help of 8 researchers, I then collected vast amounts of information related to these companies. We focused primarily on written accounts about the history of top and comparison companies, on material from their corporate archives, and on interviews with top executives, including 19 active and retired CEOs and chairmen.
As we compared the different histories, we slowly started to develop interpretations. It was a step-by-step process. For example, by comparing Shell and BP a certain idea would emerge. We then tested whether this interpretation would also work for the other companies we studied. Only those ideas that held across the board made it into the book.
No doubt, others might interpret our empirical material differently. But by carefully presenting the stories, the book provides the reader with both a compelling interpretation and an opportunity to make his or her own judgments. Hopefully this will encourage others to use history as a source for business insights.