Revival of the Fittest: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Managers Remake Them [Hardcover]

Donald N. Sull (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2003

Will your organization still be here in ten years? It's a familiar story: a company rises to become an industry leader. Competitors try to emulate it. Analysts rave about it. The CEO's picture is splashed across magazine covers. Then the company stumbles, profits erode, and the stock plummets. How does this happen? Why do good companies so often go bad? More important, what can you do to prevent it from happening to your company?In "Revival of the Fittest", Donald N. Sull takes a provocative look at corporate failure and proposes a practical new model for effecting change that can vastly increase your organization's lifespan. Ironically, argues Sull, leaders sow the seeds of failure during a company's most successful times, when they make a set of commitments - whether to a core strategy, a key customer, or an innovative manufacturing method-that constitute the company's success formula. Managers become so married to the formula that they can't divorce themselves from it when the competitive situation changes. They respond to the future by doing more of what worked in the past - a phenomenon Sull calls 'active inertia.Based on extensive global research into successful and failed transformations across many industries, "Revival of the Fittest" introduces a three-step model for making transforming commitments - actions that prevent managers from reinforcing old behaviours in the face of change. Sull identifies five areas in which transforming commitments can be anchored-strategic frames, processes, relationships, resources, and values-and provides diagnostic tests, hands-on tools, and real company examples to show how managers can: gauge their company's susceptibility to active inertia; determine which commitment is right for a specific situation; appoint the best person to lead the charge; ensure that the new commitment sticks; avoid common mistakes that can sabotage the transformation effort; and weigh the personal risks associated with leading corporate change.In an unpredictable marketplace, commitments can make and break a company. But Sull shows that corporate demise is not inevitable. Through transforming commitments, revival of the fittest is possible - and managers can make the difference. Donald N.Sull is Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management area at Harvard Business School.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"a rounded account of...how to turn stale strategies into moist, wealth-creating business models." -- Financial Times, May 12 2003

"argues that good firms go bad when they suffer from 'active inertia'...their values become dogmas, and their resources millstones." -- Economist, May 31 2003

"chock-full of compelling insights about how golden companies have been derailed and a select few have gotten back on track" -- International Herald Tribune, July 26, 2003

"fascinating...will prod you to see leadership anew, as a series of commitments that must be carefully managed." -- Toronto Globe and Mail, July 16 2003

About the Author

Donald N. Sull is an assistant professor of business administration in the Entrepreneurial Management area at Harvard Business School

Product Details

• Hardcover: 203 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press (May 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578519934
• ISBN-13: 978-1578519934
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #402,878 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Don Sull is a professor of strategy and the faculty director of executive education at the London Business School. He received his bachelors, masters, and doctorate from Harvard University, where he taught entrepreneurship. Prior to his academic career, professor Sull worked as a consultant with McKinsey & Company and as a management investor with a leveraged buyout firm. He blogs for the Financial Times (www.blogs.ft.com/donsullblog).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Darwin Redux, May 26, 2003

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Revival of the Fittest: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Managers Remake Them (Hardcover)

This is one of several business books whose subtitle really is accurate: "Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Managers Remake Them." The same can be said of a few other business books which are (to varying degrees) relevant to Sull's central thesis. For example, Jim Collins' Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies and especially Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't. In fact, I wish I had read Sull's book before reading Sydney Finkelstein's Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes, Michael Craig's The 50 Worst (and Best) Business Deals of All Time, and Robert Sobel's When Giants Stumble: Classic Business Blunders and How to Avoid Them.

According to Sull, managers make commitments which fall within three categories: commitments to strategic frames, resources, processes, relationships, and values which define an organization (e.g. Wal-Mart), commitments such as those to budget agreements, job assignments, customer guarantees, and investments which reinforce an organization (e.g. Southwest Airlines), and commitments required by shifts in the competitive marketplace which transform an organization (e.g. IBM).

Here's where it gets interesting. After years of rigorous and extensive research, Sull learned that commitments can be "double-edged swords" in that they can provide a sustainable competitive advantage as well as organizational benefits as when a pledge to achieve a given goal backed up with action creates and mobilizes energy among employees and induces them to persevere even when the outcome is uncertain. However, commitments can also limit an organization's flexibility in the present. "By focusing on one way of developing new products, for example, a company may excel at innovation in one domain but become less competent in other technologies."

Sull examines dozens of companies in which original (defining) commitments had been reaffirmed (thereby sustained) despite internal as well as external developments which rendered such commitments obsolete and even counter-productive, if not destructive. Both Firestone and Goodyear were caught in what Sull calls "The Active Inertia Trap." Goodyear escaped because its managers made commitments which transformed the organization; Firestone's managers did not. Nor did the managers at other previously great companies such as Digital Equipment organization, Data General, and Wang Laboratories. Although IBM encountered many of the same challenges as did they in its own competitive marketplace, Louis Gerstner and his associates made certain commitments which transformed their company.

For various reasons indicated, Sull has made a substantial and unique contribution to our understanding of corporate and managerial failure but also to our understanding of how some managers in some organizations effectively used one of the "sword's" edges to cut through what Jim O'Toole has characterized as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom" and thereby freed those organizations from "The Active Inertia Trap."

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Successful Second Acts, January 25, 2004

By 

Gregory Mobley (West Newton, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Revival of the Fittest: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Managers Remake Them (Hardcover)

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1940 that there are no second acts in American Lives. Professor Sull's witty, crystalline prose in Revival of the Fittest offers a rebuttal. Sull's case-studies of corporate rebounds and managerial reinventions provides a global array of second acts.

Contrary to the following review, Sull's wise reflections, his acute hindsight, on what separates mid-course corporate successes from failures is full of insights, though not quick-fixes or one-size-fits-all makeovers.

Rather, Sull provides an array of diagnostic tools for managers, helping them isolate the "active inertia"--a term he has coined and that is gaining currency among business theorists--and sift through the vast horizon of possibilities and risks managers in crisis must face.

A multi-disciplinary work with a global perspective, Revival of the Fittest is both informative and potentially transforming.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Refreshing look at the rise, fall, rebound of companies, November 19, 2003

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"spai2" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Revival of the Fittest: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Managers Remake Them (Hardcover)

This is an excellent, pragmatic, and thoroughly engaging book on how successful companies can find themselves at risk for failure due to what Sull coins as "active inertia". This concept is illustrated with a great set of corporate examples which are different from the ones used in many other business texts -- and this is a key feature which sets the book apart from its competitors. Sull walks the reader through some very useable steps for how companies can transform themselves and avert obsolescence. A great book, greatly written.