On his book Enduring Success: What We Can Learn from the History of Outstanding Corporations
Cover Interview of February 06, 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.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 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.