In the chapter Clock Building, Not Time Telling of his book Built to Last, Jim Collins et. al. take a look at how an organization’s leadership structure — their roles, cultures and perspectives — affect the longevity (or more precisely, the legacy) of that organization.

Time Telling is identified as having a great idea or being a charismatic visionary leader, while Clock Building is building a company that can prosper far beyond the presence of any singer leader and through multiple product life cycles1. To further illustrate these concepts, the book offers the example of a person able to look at the sky and state the exact time and date: a time teller. Such a skill (or its analogues) would be amazing and extremely beneficial. However, a better skill would be to have the ability to build a clock that could tell time for anybody, anywhere, even long after the time-teller is gone: a clock builder.

Read more over at Kaizen — Continuous improvement by small changes or download the PDF for this handout.

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