Centennials: The 12 Habits of Great, Enduring Organisations

by Alex Hill

Start-ups rarely survive their second birthday. Even established firms in the UK and the US average a life of only fifteen years. So how can your company build and sustain success for decades to come?

Professor Alex Hill has conducted thirteen years of groundbreaking research into a clutch of organisations that have outperformed their peers for over 100 years - from NASA to the New Zealand All Blacks, from Eton College and the Royal College of Art to the Royal Marines and the Royal Shakespeare Company. And what he has found is that these very different organisations all share remarkably similar strategies when it comes to building and maintaining excellence and success - strategies that frequently fly in the face of conventional business wisdom.

Here Professor Hill shares the twelve traits that have set these organisations apart for over a century, from the way they analyse success and failure to their approach to finding the best people and the brightest new ideas. In so doing, he identifies the strategies and habits that you can employ in your company to create a strong and stable core and to ensure the same long-term prosperity. In short, he shows you how to build a promising enterprise into an enduring, great organisation.
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'An instant classic.' Charles Handy, author of 'The Empty Raincoat' and 'The Second Curve'

'Every CEO should be given a copy with their morning coffee.' Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford

'If you want to learn what it takes to achieve truly sustainable success in an organisation, then this is a book for you.' Shaun Fitzgerald, OBE, Director of the Centre for Climate Repair at the University of Cambridge

Genres: Business, Nonfiction

274 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 15, 2023

Reviews

[Peter Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite liked this leadership book. It is difficult to find something that provides a different slant on leadership. The concept of long lasting successful organisations is an interesting one and given that 90% of business don’t last finding examples is not easy. By its very nature and structure we are often focused on short term goals. CEOS churn quickly and often coworkers are more concerned about own promotion than the long term good of the institution.

I’m not sure all the organisations referenced (RSC, RCA etc) are actually particularly good examples of centennial organisations as their long livedness may be for reasons of brand rather than purely leadership.

Often leadership books like to look at elite sport for examples of leadership. And ironically great sporting leaders like Clive Woodward have taken business principles to sport. And indeed that cross learning is just one of the examples promoted here.

Importantly this text gets you to question your own organisation, teams and leadership. It’s accessible, thoughtful and promotes reflection. Worth a read.

[Tõnu Vahtra · Rating 3 out of 5]

What does it take to become and remain a 100+ year organization (initially misread the title as company). Author discusses a number of organizations (NASA, New Zealand All Blacks, Eton College, Royal College of Art, Royal Marines, Royal Shakespeare Company, Disney) that have lasted over 100 years and what qualities have enabled this. Several of them have also faced difficult periods (All Blacks, Disney, NASA), these are described but it's not that convincing that they have actually managed to overcome the most fundamental ones. I have read separate books on some of them (All Blacks, Disney) which have mentioned the challenges and special elements of their culture and key historic milestones, the academic institutions have been less known and less interesting. In summary it's mostly pastime reading and exampling general best practices, not a new and highly structured framework. Also as stated in another review that some of the companies might not be the best examples for how to build long-lasting company because they have been lasting mainly due to their "brand".

"Centennials strike a careful balance between what might be termed the ‘disruptive experts’ essential for innovation and change, who are always questioning, challenging and trying to move things forward, and the ‘stable stewards’, who preserve what is best about the organisation’s culture and stop it lurching off track."

"The key to enduring success is for organisations to be “radically traditional”, combining a stable core with a disruptive edge. These provide the basis for 6 Principles and 12 Habits. "

Stable purpose
*Do we positively shape society's beliefs and behaviours?
*Do we engage and develop the next generation of talent?

Stable stewardship
*Do we have the right stewards in place to keep us on track?
*Do we carefully manage stewardship handovers so we always stay on track?

Stable openness
*Do we perform in public to encourage everyone to perform at their best?
*Do we share our stories so others trust us and want to work with us?

Disruptive experts
*Do we find brillian people and ask them to work with us part-time?
*Do we recruit and retain the world's best talent?

Disruptive nervousness
*Do we always focus on getting better, not bigger?
*Do we constanly X-ray everything we do?

Disruptive accidents
*Do we encourage chance encounters?
*Do we eat, drink and hag out together?

[Dora Okeyo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Centennial: Adjective

"Lasting a hundred years."

I bought this book because I was curious to know how organizations stood the test of time, and there is something about lists like 'the 10 things..., top 5 things...' that psychologically tell you that you'll not have to be bogged down by so much information before you get to what the author is saying and I love lists. ☺️

In two parts, the author explores the 12 habits of great, enduring organizations and these two parts are: stable core- which speaks to the foundations, culture and strategy these organizations set and disruptive edge- which builds on their processes, systems and flexibility over time in committing to their strategies. I particularly loved Habit 1: Build your North Star because I am learning that it's important to stay on course, to know what you want to achieve and having a clear vision and a team that understands and values this, sets you on the right path.

Habit 9, in the second part of the book is a challenge and this habit is 'Get better, not bigger,' and here he looks into growth and scale for organizations - when things are going great it's human instinct to want to take up more challenges, expand and invite more people to help meet the needs of scale, but here he explores the need for processes and systems that deliver at scale while ensuring that focus on the stable core- in part one are upheld.

This habit 9, is one I've been mulling over a lot at work, asking myself 'how do you scale culture? how do you ensure that you have visibility of your organization priorities in not one but hundreds of teams spread across a country? how do you catch those moments that can disrupt or distort your values?

[Gaitri Kumari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alex Hill's Centennials eloquently explains what makes institutions endure for more than a century. Using extensive case studies, he demonstrates how genuinely outstanding organizations embrace change at its disruptive edges while preserving "a stable nucleus of values developed over time" (p. xv). He cautions that "many non-Centennial enterprises today sadly lack this balance" (p. xv).

The book serves as a pertinent reminder that "everything will eventually collapse if everything is continuously booming and busting" (p. xvi). Anyone looking to create anything that lasts beyond the next quarter should read this.

[andy fortmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

novel perspective on a compelling goal

Prof Hill has tapped into his own creativity to suss out an impressive analysis on this book.

Sustained superior performance is really the mark of elite organizations— but 100 years is probably longer than most assign to the term.

In choosing this centennial mark, the author has matrixed important truths together in an accessible and simple framework that, importantly, he substantiates.

I look forward to using his toolset with my future teams.

Thanks for writing this great book, and for doing the work that preceded it Alex!

[Nicola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful, interesting and well written. Lots to think about and I would read more by this author.

[David Ireri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Insightful concepts that cut across time