Happy Wednesday and welcome to another edition of “things Ariele is doing for her fake master’s degree.”
My fake master’s degree reading list included a book titled, Built to Last; Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by James C Collins and Jerry I Porras. I started reading this book about 5 years ago and got about 2 chapters in. The reason? It was hard. Also, I wasn’t ready for it yet.
That sounds ridiculous: “I wasn’t ready yet,” but it would be the same problem if I picked up a book on fourth-year calculus, when my math skills are probably at a high school algebra level. I have a basic understanding of trigonometry, but I’ve forgotten pretty much everything past that.
I wasn’t ready to read this book until after I read The E-Myth Revisited and really started thinking about my author business as a business. I started to envision myself hiring other people. I started to think about the wide variety of tasks I do as being essential vs. non-essential (basically, in order for my business to operate, what do I HAVE to be doing, and what could I hand off to someone else or eliminate altogether). I started to strip down my business into checklists and task maps, and try to look at it from a high-level perspective.
I’m not just an author. I’m not just a creator. I’m not just a consultant.
I’m a business owner.
(Aside: the post I wrote about the Franchise Model of Publishing was part of reading E-Myth Revisited and trying to imagine my own tiny author business as a behemoth).
Built to Last is a book on business. It explores the practices of really big, really famous, enduring companies (like 50 years old +) and compared them to companies in the same industry that did not succeed. It delved into their habits, their practices, and their strategies, ultimately trying to figure out what made those companies successful. Think 3M, Coca Cola, IBM, Proctor&Gamble, Johnson&Johnson, Merck, and lots more. They did research, case studies, and analysis—and it was ultimately fascinating.
As part of the process, the authors came up with 12 Myths—basically, things that people believe about successful companies that aren’t actually true.
The myths are as follows (p 7 - 11):
It takes a great idea to start a company.
Visionary companies require great an charismatic visionary leaders.
The most successful companies exist first and foremost to maximize profits.
Visionary companies share a common subset of “correct” core values.
The only constant is change.
Blue-chip companies play it safe.
Visionary companies are great places to work for everyone.
Highly successful companies make their best moves by brilliant and complex strategic planning.
Companies should hire outside CEOs to stimulate fundamental change.
The most successful companies focus primarily on beating the competition.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Companies become visionary primarily through “vision statements.”
The book then delves into each of these myths and talks about why they aren’t true, and provides examples from the top-tier, longstanding companies. It even goes into examples of when the companies almost collapsed but managed to get back on their feet again.
If you decide to pick up this book and decide it’s too dense for you, I recommend at very least reading Chapters 1 and 11. Game changer. I thought about Chapter 1 for weeks before I started into Chapter 2 (the second time around). And I’ve read Chapter 11 four times already. Not to mention, I haven’t stopped talking about it—I bring it up in any conversation we have about business (which is a lot because Josh is getting his MBA). Pretty sure he’s is sick of hearing about this book by now.
But the trick, as it always is with these types of books, is trying to think about it from the viewpoint of an author. Authors are notoriously one-person businesses. They have their products (books) which take years to produce, but also have no shelf-life (well, most of them don’t, unless you wrote a book about the internet in 2005). Authors tend to be solitary, outsource production (either to a publishing company, or a print-on-demand company), and they tend not to have a lot of capital.
So how can we use the concepts in this book to make our businesses better, smarter, more efficient, and more effective?
I think there is an overwhelming focus on marketing in the author community. Everyone is trying to figure out how to sell their books. And marketing is important, yes, but it’s really only one piece of a much bigger puzzle—at least if you’re publishing books as a career or trying to achieve some kind of financial success. Even if your goals are more focused on spreading ideas or making a difference in the world (as opposed to money or fame) having a fully-functioning, operational business is going to make those things so much easier—and you’ll last longer and be able to do more.
So, as always, I begin by practicing on myself.
One of the main conclusions I drew from the book is related to Myth #5: The only constant is change. In fact, there are three constants: you core values, your core purpose, and the fact that everything else changes.
In Chapter 11, they say:
“…the fundamental distinguishing characteristic of the most enduring and successful corporations is that they preserve a cherished core ideology while simultaneously stimulating progress and change in everything that is not part of their core ideology… In truly great companies, change is a constant, but not the only constant.” (p. 220)
So let’s talk about creating a core ideology.
Developing an Author’s Core Ideology
I would like to reiterate that you should buy this book and read Chapter 11. Go through all of their exercises with your own feelings and values in mind as applied to your writing.
They define core ideology as:
“…self-identity that remains consistent through time and transcends product/market life cycles, technological breakthroughs, management fads, and individual leaders… Core ideology provides the bonding glue that holds an organization together as it grows, decentralizes, diversifies, expands globally, and attains diversity within.” (p 221)
If everything changes, in order to create a set of core values, then the key is to ask ourselves: what about our business (about our writing, our books, and the way we operate) will never change?
It’s about those key pieces within us that we will never turn our backs on. That will follow us through the course of our lives. And will likely show up over and over and over as themes and motifs and concepts in our books and various mediums for storytelling.
Porras and Collins split the concept of core ideology into two sub-components: Core Values and Core Purpose—which is great because it makes it much easier to develop a core ideology.
An Author’s Core Values
This took me forever to figure out. Like six months. It’s possible you will know these right off the top of your head, but I highly recommend taking some time to really consider it. Do some thought experiments—”Will I still believe this IF… [fill in some crazy thing happening here]?”
For example, “Will I still think this if civilization goes backwards? If XYZ important person in my life dies? If I switch religions? If I become homeless? If I get cancer? If I win the lottery and never have to work another day in my life? If I achieve all of my craziest author dreams and get to do whatever I want all the time?” Alternatively, they suggest thinking about if you were to get punished for having this value, would you still hold onto it? If you got put in jail for it? If you were executed for it? Would you still hold that value no matter what?
The book defines core values as:
“…the organization’s essential and enduring tenets—a small set of timeless guiding principles that require no external justification; they have intrinsic value and importance to those inside the organization.” (p 222)
When I asked myself: “What about me and my work will never change?” I came up with three things:
Respect for other people.
Skill development and personal growth.
Exploration of ideas.
And I sort of summed them all up as: I will prioritize moving forward as an objective—as society, as an individual, or as an idea: how can we collectively move forward? How can this idea evolve and grow? How can I personally evolve, grow, move forward?
I honestly think your key values can be anything. They could be about telling the best stories. About creating an escape. They could be about your faith or your politics or your fundamental beliefs about right and wrong. But they have to be constant—something about you that will never change.
I will add here, that while I’m only a few decades into life (3), I have already learned that sometimes the core values I thought I had, turned out to not be so core after all. So this concept definitely deserves some real time, effort, and consideration.
A few points they made in the book:
If you come up with more than five or six things, that’s probably too many.
You can’t “choose” core values—they have to already, intrinsically, be there. They say this, of course, from an organizational perspective. I do believe as individuals we can choose our values, but we have to work on them and really believe them in the core of who we are.
The values should “stand the test of time” (p 222).
You should not change your values as the market or world changes—instead, you should change the markets or the world.
Core values are something that you should hold onto even when they prove to be a disadvantage to you.
Once you’ve figured out what your core values are, you’ll be able to apply them to everything—your marketing plan, your business strategy, your publishing plan—they can even help you figure out what books to write or focus on (if you’re having trouble deciding).
An Author’s Core Purpose
Porras’ and Collins’ definition of core purpose is quite simple: “the organization’s fundamental reason for being” (p 224). They say that they think that core purpose is ultimately more important than core values because “It captures the soul of the organization” (p 224).
A core purpose can never be fulfilled—it is something that you are always working towards, but never actually achieving. It can be unique, or it can be the same as someone else’s. Like the core values—it can be anything at all.
This was a bit more challenging for me, but in the the book, they offered an exercise where you draft a rough purpose, and then ask the question, “Why is this important?” five times to help narrow down what your beliefs really are. Again, you should read the book (or the chapter) because they give some really great examples and they are helpful to read.
I did the exercise with a couple of different statements (“I write books with diverse characters” and “I tell stories that explore lots of ideas”), and ultimately came up with the following for my core purpose:
“My core purpose is to tell stories that reflect the wide range of human experience.”
It’s something that can never be achieved, check. (Because human experience will only ever keep widening, so there will always be more experiences, ideas, and perspectives to explore).
It can help me guide my business strategy, check. (Because it will help me decide what books to write, how to market, etc.)
It can help guide the behavior of people within my organization, check. (Because it focuses around respect for other people, which also ties back to my core values).
It can be a source of inspiration, check.
It can be the basis for the culture of my organization, check. (Respect, diversity, representation, ya’ll.)
It can guide my company in the long-term, check. (No matter what the world thinks, we prioritize the inherent value of human beings above all else—money, fame, etc.)
It can act as the glue—a common vision that holds together the various people that work in my organization, check.
It can be the source of my organization’s identity, check.
It can motivate action and help us get things done, check.
At any rate, I’d say I have a good start. Next up in this book is figuring out your envisioned future, but I’m going to save that for another post.
In the meantime, read the book! And I will leave you with this metaphorical picture of me:
