GREAT COMPANIES "once"

In my HP Phenom blog, I reported this morning on some musing that several of us did this week -- What are the metrics that determine GREAT COMPANIES?   Remember Jim Collins' book, Built to Last?  That book argued that "staying power" was paramount, and HP was a leading example.  Critics took Collins to task, especially Richard Foster, arguing that adaptiveness to change was key.  That inspired Collins to write "Good to Great", which was a superb book also.  I'd recommend both of those Collins books, along with Foster's "Creative Destruction".  Foster found out that HP was the fastest growing company for the four decade period 1958-1998, but wouldn't report it in his book because he didn't know how HP did it, and he felt most readers wouldn't believe the answer anyway since HP was "so stodgy" as he reported it to me.

For these folk, REVENUE GROWTH is the key parameter (see my HP Blog for 'our answer')

So anyway, I did some compilations for your edification.  Here's the news

The four companies whose CEOs or Board Chairs HEADED THE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION on COMPETITIVENESS for America this past decade are DuPont, Merck, Xerox, and Motorola.  You might recall that John Young set this commission up for President Ronald Reagan in the mid-1980s in response to the Japanese threat.  Their website today says they are MOST INTERESTED in having US COMPANIES COMPETITIVE and the AMERICAN WORKER with a great job.

So how did the collective wisdom leading this commission do with their own companies?  On aggregate, they managed REVENUE GROWTH of NEGATIVE 2% for the entire decade .  They lost 59% in PROFITS, 62 % in Employees and 73% in American employees.  THANK GOD for their leadership for America.

How did they get picked, why are their companies honored in the first place?  Well, from 1960-1970, they grew 350% from $5.4 B to $28B, and then got pretty big the next decade, growing 175% to 87B.  By now, 1990, the "BRAND" was built.  Sure, the next decade was not quite as good, growing 5% per year and 60% overall to $126B.  So, we found ourselves in 2001--and amid the dot.com meltdown all of Silicon Valley is suspect, but these companies are "THE HEARTLAND" of corporate America.  And the heartland, just as much as, and maybe more than, Wall Street, let us down.

Each of these esteemed leaders, and collectively all of them, should have EGG on their face, and apologies galore for American workers, but instead we have CORPORATE INNOVATION POLICY for America built on the flawed predicates of these clowns.

Robert Atkinson's new book, INNOVATION ECONOMICS, could have and should have cited specific examples like these to buttress his strong and compelling arguments about AMERICAN LUNACY re INNOVATION.  He notes, for example, that we don't need to do much more outsourcing because we've already done it all -- getting rid of 15,000,000 manufacturing jobs (more than half of what the country had).

If you think Merck, Xerox, Motorola, and DuPont are singularities, guess again.  IBM, Boeing, Texas Instruments, and Kodak were powerful potent BIG players in 2000.  Their collective performance matched the other four.  Kodak since 2010 has been the worst train wreck, but the other seven aren't far behind.  And now Elon Musk has done public to say that Boeing designed the dumbest approach to lithium-ion batteries imaginable (and his track record on that topic is pretty solid).

Where did these leaders get their training?  One guess -- Harvard Busienss School