The Built To Flip Economy

from the from-good-to-crook dept

Jim Collins, the author of both Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies and Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't, has written an article looking at all the corporate scandals going on these days. His conclusion is that we've been dealing with a built to flip economy, where too many people were simply looking to cash out, instead of to build a sustainable business. This, of course, shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, but he does go through and make some good points about the types of people involved. He classifies people into four different categories: those who stayed true to their ideals in building a real, sustainable company, those who progressively were pushed down the path to opportunism one step at a time, those who consciously were opportunists seeing this as a "once in a lifetime" chance to get rich, and finally the "evil" conductors of the whole mess who knew exactly what they were doing leading everyone into a position where they, themselves, could cash out. The article also describes the types of things that sustainable companies do, compared to those that are just built to flip.

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