Enduring great companies don't exist merely to deliver returns to shareholders. Indeed, in a truly great company, profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body. They are absolutely essential for life, but they are not the very point of life.

Core ideology

An important caveat to the concept of core values is that there are no specific "right" core values for becoming an enduring great company. A company need not have passion for its customers, respect for the individual, quality, or social responsibility to become enduring and great. The point is not what core values you have, but that you have core values at all, that you know what they are, that you build them explicitly into the organization, and that you preserve them over time.

Why greatness?

What if someone says: "I don't really want to build a huge company. Is there something wrong with that?"

Not at all. Greatness doesn't depend on size.

Then what if that person replies: "Okay, I accept that I don't need to build a big company to have a great company. But even so, why should I try to build a great company? What if I just want to be successful?". The authors come up with two answers.

First, the authors believe that it is no harder to build something great than to build something good. It might be statistically more rare to reach greatness, but it does not require more suffering than perpetuating mediocrity. Indeed, if some of the comparison companies are any indication, it involves less suffering, and perhaps even less work. The beauty and power of the research findings are that they can radically simplify our lives whole increasing our effectiveness. There is great solace in the simple fact of clarity - about what is vital, and what is not.

Indeed, the point of this entire book is not that we should "add" these findings to what we are already doing and make ourselves even more overworked. No, the point is to realize that much of what we're doing is at best a waste of energy. If we organized the majority of our work time around applying these principles, and pretty much ignored or stopped doing everything else, our lives would be simpler and our results vastly improved.

If it's no harder, the results better, and the process so much more fun, why wouldn't you go for greatness?

The authors are not suggesting that going from good to great is easy, or that every organization will successfully make the shift. By definition, it is not possible for everyone to be above average. But the authors are asserting that those who strive to turn good into great find the process no more painful or exhausting than those who settle for just letting things wallow along in mind-numbing mediocrity. Yes, turning good into great takes energy, but the building of momentum adds more energy back into the pool than it takes out.

There is a second answer to the question of why greatness, one that is at the very heart of what motivated the authors to undertake this huge project in the first place: the search for meaning, or more precisely, the search for meaningful work.

If you're doing something you care that much about, and you believe in its purpose deeply enough, then it is impossible to imagine not trying to make it great. It's just a given. You don't need to have some grand existential reason for why you love what you're doing or to care deeply about your work (although you might). All that matters is that you do love it and that you do care.

So the question of Why greatness? is almost a nonsense question. If you're engaged in work that you love and care about, for whatever reason, then the question needs no answer. The question is not why, but how.

Indeed, the real question is not, "Why greatness?" but "What work makes you feel compelled to try to create greatness?" If you have to ask the question, "Why should we try to make it great? Isn't success enough?" then you're probably engaged in the wrong line of work.

Perhaps your quest to be part of building something great will not fall in your business life. But find it somewhere. If not in corporate life, then perhaps in making your church great. If not there, then perhaps a nonprofit, a community organization, or a class you teach. Great is involved in something that you care so much about that you want to make it the greatest it can possibly be, not because of what you will get, but just because it can be done.

When all these pieces come together, not only does your work move toward greatness but so does your life. For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work. Perhaps, then, you might gain that rare tranquillity that comes from knowing that you've had a hand in creating something of intrinsic excellence that makes a contribution. Indeed, you might even gain that deepest of all satisfactions: knowing that your short time here on this earth has been well spent and that it mattered.