The cellular structure of any truly great organization is the well-led unit, for this is where great things get done. Great leadership at the top doesn’t amount to very much without exceptional leadership at the unit level. If you want to build a truly great company or social-sector enterprise, you need to cultivate legions of unit leaders who, in turn, create unit cohesion in pursuit of audacious objectives. If you want to scale your culture, if you want to make the journey from great company to enduring great company, you must invest in building a pipeline of the right unit leaders.

There is a paradox evident in those who build the great companies. On one hand, they concentrate on high-level vision and strategy while, on the other hand, they involve themselves with seemingly trivial details. The acceptance of the paradox lies in understanding that details are not trivial. Details matter. The most effective leaders are obsessed with both vision and details. They are fanatical about getting the details right.

How you deal with certain details is actually a very high level statement—a statement about the core values of the company. Involving yourself with certain details can send a very powerful symbolic message.

It’s good practice to codify your vision on paper. Writing it down forces you to think rigorously about what exactly you are trying to do. Even more important, it’s a critical step in making it the organization’s vision, rather than the vision of a single leader.

I’d like to close this chapter with an essential caveat about persistence from Built to Last. Of all the paragraphs I’ve authored or co-authored in thirty years, this is one of the most essential for entrepreneurs and leaders of early-stage ventures, reproduced here as a reminder to keep firmly in mind as you build your company:

The builders of visionary companies were highly persistent, living to the motto: Never, never, never give up. But what to persist with? The company. Be prepared to kill, revise, or evolve an idea . . . but never give up on the company. If you equate the success of your company with the success of a specific idea—as many businesspeople do—then you’re more likely to give up on the company if that idea fails; and if that idea happens to succeed, you’re more likely to have an emotional love affair with that idea and stick with it too long, when the company should be moving vigorously on to other things. But if you see the ultimate creation as the company, not the execution of a specific idea . . . then you can persist beyond any specific idea—good or bad— and move toward becoming an enduring great institution.

Do More Clock Building, Less Time Telling

Leading as a charismatic visionary—a “genius with a thousand helpers” upon whom everything depends—is time telling. Shaping a culture that can thrive far beyond any single leader is clock building. Searching for a single great idea upon which to build success is time telling. Building an organization that can generate many great ideas is clock building. Our research showed that leaders who build enduring great companies make the shift from time telling to clock building. Clock builders create highly replicable recipes, extensive training programs, leadership-development pipelines, and tangible mechanisms to reinforce core values. They get the right people on the bus and then manage the system, not the people. For true clock builders, success comes when the organization proves its greatness not just during one leader’s tenure but also when the next generation of leadership further increases flywheel momentum. To use an analogy, think of writing the U.S. Constitution as a consummate act of clock building, so that the start-up nation might endure beyond the courage and genius of those who won the War of Independence. Similarly, launching a start-up is like winning the War of Independence, but building a company that can last is like writing the Constitution. (Directed reading: Built to Last, Chapter 2; Great by Choice, Chapter 6.)