Built to Change

Preface

Excellence is about change. We would not have said this in the 1980s or perhaps even in the 1990s. Today it almost goes without saying. Most organizations simply cannot sustain excellent performance unless they are capable of changing.

In the 1980s, the best-known management book was In Search of Excellence. It identified a number of companies that were excellent performers. By the late 1980s many of them had ceased to be excellent performers. It was not that they had lost the ability to do what they had done; it was simply that what they had done no longer fit the demands of the business environment.

In the 1990s, the leading book on organizational excellence was Built to Last. Contrary to many people’s perceptions, Built to Last was ...