Thought Leadership After nearly five years on multiple business best-seller lists, over 70 printings, and 16 translations, Jim Collins's Built to Last (October 2006; Palgrave MacMillan) is a book few people in business have missed. And even if you did, there was always Collins's tag-along treatise, Good to Great, wherein the consultant and author discloses how great companies have "big, hairy, audacious goals."
Given Collins's hardy publishing track record, few rivals have dared to challenge Collins's big, hairy thinking. That is, until recently.
Meet Nikos Mourkogiannis, the former head of Monitor Group's European business and current senior partner at London-based Panthea. Mourkogiannis's latest book explores a meaty subject that Mourkogiannis believes Collins's two books have skated past.
"After Built to Last was published, I waited for Collins to write a sequel that talked about purpose, but he never did. Hairy goals are not purpose. And what needs to be known is that the real difference between good companies and great companies is purpose."
In his recently published Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies, Mourkogiannis explores how leaders of some of the greatest, most resilient companies — from Henry Ford to Warren Buffett — all have shared one important quality. You guessed it! Purpose.
So, what is this "purpose" of which he speaks? Mourkogiannis is better at describing what it is not than at saying what it actually is. Nonetheless, through his elaborate discussion of different leaders and their relation to various schools of morality, this is one book someone with an interest in business and a weakness for philosophy might find essential reading.
Will Amazon start selling it as a companion volume to Built to Last? We'll leave that up to you.
Now watch Panthea's Nikos Mourkogiannis be interviewed by Consulting Magazine associate editor Ines Peschiera on This Week In Consulting.
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