Today sees the relaunch of the Conservative Party’s statement of values, Built to Last. The original version of this document was submitted for comment to party members, and their criticisms and observations were incorporated into the revised version. Anyone seeking hard policy detail will, of course be sadly disappointed. For that isn’t the point of the document. It is there to set the mood music for Cameron’s rebranding exercise, which has been heavily influenced by the Neo-Con methodology of Frank Luntz.

But what of this document’s title, “Built to Last�? Daniel Finkelstein sussed out its origin back in July – it’s also the title of a business management volume by Jim Collins written in 1994. Collins

identifie[d] 18 "visionary" companies and sets out to determine what's special about them. To get on the list, a company had to be world famous, have a stellar brand image, and be at least 50 years old. We're talking about companies that even a layperson knows to be, well, different: the Disneys, the Wal-Marts, the Mercks.

Because it was written a decade ago, it has proved possible to revisit Collins’ thesis and the performance of these companies themselves, as two journalists, Jennifer Reingold and Ryan Underwood, have done. This proves interesting in relation to what it says both about Cameron’s attempt to use management techniques to reshape his party, and what it also says about the Conservative Party itself.

The first thing Reingold and Underwood note, is that

What we found was that while the companies in BTL were indeed built to last, they haven't all been built to emulate. As for the principles, many of them still hold up today, partly because some of them are so broad as to appear applicable to virtually everyone. "It's so slippery, it's like grabbing a frog," says Richard D'Aveni, professor of strategic management at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, of the book.

There is clear correlation between this and the introduction to Cameron’s Built to last; it is difficult to see anything other than bland platitudes that virtually anyone could sign up to in the opening statement. Furthermore:

Ten years on, almost half of the visionary companies on the list have slipped dramatically in performance and reputation, and their vision currently seems more blurred than clairvoyant. Consider the fates of Motorola, Ford, Sony, Walt Disney, Boeing, Nordstrom, and Merck. Each has struggled in recent years, and all have faced serious questions about their leadership and strategy. Odds are, none of them today would meet BTL's criteria for visionary companies, which required that they be the premier player in their industry and be widely admired by people in the know.

Again, that is an eerily accurate description of the Conservative Party today, a decade on from its election defeat in 1997.
One of the final paragraphs offers a neat description of what Cameron is trying to do with his party:

BTL offered a message of hope and good feeling in an era when horizons seemed limitless: If you could unite your company around a system of core values that everyone actually believed in and goals that were wildly ambitious, you could have great success. "There are three critical success factors [with a business book]," says D'Aveni. "One, tell people what they want to hear and give them hope. Two, make it a Rorschach test, and three, keep it so simple that it really doesn't examine the truth of the world in enough depth so people get a false sense of clarity." BTL, he says, possesses all three.

So do Cameron’s Conservatives.

But if you want to create a Political Party with solid principles and policies that address real issues, you need to do more than create an empty cipher.