A concept from Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras’ Built to Last, shared by Indivara CTO Antonius Kho.
What makes a company truly great? Not great for a quarter, or a product cycle, or even a CEO’s tenure, but great across decades, through leadership changes, through entire market shifts?
It is a question Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras spent six years trying to answer. In Built to Last, published in 1994, they and their research team studied 18 visionary companies alongside carefully selected direct competitors to identify the patterns behind enduring success. Antonius Kho, CTO of Indivara Group, still finds one of the book’s central ideas worth revisiting.
What the research found
Collins and Porras’ finding wasn’t about products or talent. It was about something that outlasts both.
“The definition of a great company does not lie in how good their products are,” Antonius says, walking through the research. “Even less does it depend on how good the people inside are at any point in time.”
The evidence is almost counterintuitive. Hewlett-Packard once manufactured an automatic urinal. American Express, whose name sounds like a logistics company, started out as exactly that. These weren’t confused companies. They were companies whose internal capability kept generating what the market needed, regardless of what they’d built before.
“Products have a lifespan,” Antonius says. “They’re not always relevant. So there must be a capability inside that makes them always generate the next one.”
That capability, Collins and Porras argue, comes from something he called core ideology, a set of values so consistently lived that they shape how people behave regardless of what the company is building or who’s running it. Not words framed in a lobby. Not a slide in an onboarding deck.
“Every company has core values. Every company has a vision,” Antonius notes. “Walk into any large corporation and you’ll see them displayed nicely. But for most of them, it’s only a good word on the wall.”
The difference isn’t having the values. It’s whether people actually live them. When they do, values stop being a document. They become behaviors. Behavior becomes culture. And culture, unlike any product or any individual leader, can survive almost anything.
Clock builders and time tellers
One of the book’s central distinctions is between a clock builder and a time teller. Antonius explains it using Collins and Porras’ analogy.
Imagine there are no clocks. The only way to tell time is to read the sun and the shadows. Now imagine one person who figures out how to do this.
A time teller keeps that skill to themselves not out of forgetfulness, but deliberately. The thinking goes: if others depend on me to tell the time, I feel useful, needed, important. So the skill stays hoarded. And whenever someone asks, they have to come to you.
A clock builder does something different. “Rather than having everyone rely on me,” Antonius says, relaying Collins and Porras’ idea, “what matters is that I teach people to go further. I build something so that all people can tell the time themselves and never have to ask me.”
The goal isn’t to be the person who feels important. It’s to build something that works without you.
It’s not just about individual leaders
Collins and Porras did not limit this idea to individual founders or executives. They applied it to entire organizations, and the implication is just as important.
Even the most brilliant, charismatic CEO can be a time teller at the company level.
A company can have a genuinely great leader: charismatic, visionary, someone who always knows what to do and still has a time teller problem. Because if that leader is the one holding all the knowledge and direction, the organization is dependent on a person, not built around a capability.
“A great leader alone doesn’t make the company last long,” Antonius says. “Because when the great leader is gone, the company becomes not good, not great.”
Clock building at the organizational level means embedding capability in how the company operates: how decisions are made, how values are lived, and how people are developed. “Clock building refers to the whole organization, not just the leader,” Antonius says. “Whoever is inside, there is continuity. People are built to have the capability.”
The question worth sitting with
Collins and Porras’ research pointed to one defining characteristic of great companies: they were built to outlast the people who built them.
For individual leaders, it’s a useful question to sit with: when you’re no longer in the room, does the capability you’ve built stay or does it leave with you?
For organizations, it’s the same question at a different scale. If your strongest leaders left tomorrow, would the capability stay? Would the values keep shaping behavior? Would the clock keep running?
If the answer is no, even if things look strong right now, it’s worth asking whether you’re building a clock, or just telling the time.
This article is based on a conversation with Antonius Kho, CTO of Indivara, who shared his reading of Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras’ Built to Last (1994).