Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great

by Jim Collins

In creating a good-to-great transformation, there’s no single defining action, no grand program, no single killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment. Rather, it feels like turning a giant, heavy flywheel.

Pushing with great effort, you get the flywheel to inch forward. You keep pushing, and with persistent effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn. You don’t stop. You keep pushing. The flywheel moves a bit faster. Two turns . . . then four . . . then eight . . . the flywheel builds momentum . . . sixteen . . . thirty-two . . . moving faster . . . a thousand . . . ten thousand . . . a hundred thousand. Then at some point—breakthrough! The flywheel flies forward with almost unstoppable momentum.

Once you fully grasp how to create flywheel momentum in your particular circumstance (which is the topic of this monograph) and apply that understanding with creativity and discip...

Each turn builds upon previous work as you make a series of good decisions, supremely well executed, that compound one upon anoth...

Bezos, Stone continued, considered Amazon’s application of the flywheel concept “the secret sauce.”2

Each component in the flywheel sets you up for the next component, indeed, almost throwing you around the loop.

When caught in the doom loop, companies react to disappointing results without discipline—grasping for a new savior, program, fad, event, or direction—only to experience more disappointment.

Never underestimate the power of a great flywheel, especially when it builds compounding momentum over a very long time.

Once you get your flywheel right, you want to renew and extend that flywheel for years to decades—decision upon decision, action upon action, turn by turn—each loop adding to the cumulative effect.

In thinking about your own flywheel, it’s absolutely vital that it not be conceived as merely a list of static objectives that you’ve simply drawn as a circle. It must capture the sequence that ignites and accelerates momentum.

The intellectual discipline required to get the sequence right can produce profound strategic insight.

the greatest danger in business and life lies not in outright failure but in achieving success without understanding why you were successful in the first place.

One of the biggest, and most common, strategic mistakes lies in failing to aggressively and persistently make the most of victories.

Yet our research across multiple studies shows that if you conceive of your flywheel in the right way—and if you continually renew and extend the flywheel—it can be remarkably durable, perhaps even capable of carrying your organization through a major strategic inflection point or turbulent disruption.

But to do so requires understanding the underlying architecture of the flywheel as distinct from a single line of business or arena of activity.

the underlying architecture of the flywheel

For a truly great company, the Big Thing is never any specific line of business or product or idea or invention.

The Big Thing is your underlying flywheel architecture, properly conceived.

This doesn’t mean mindlessly repeating what you’ve done before. It means evolving, expanding, extending.

If you wake up one day to realize that your underlying flywheel no longer works, or that it’s going to be disrupted into oblivion, then accept the fact that it must be recreated or replaced.

But before you decide to toss out your flywheel, first make sure you understand its underlying architecture.

Test the flywheel against the three circles of your Hedgehog Concept.

A Hedgehog Concept is a simple, crystalline concept that flows from deeply understanding the intersection of the following three circles: (1) what you’re deeply passionate about, (2) what you can be the best in the world at, and (3) what drives your economic or resource engine.

Does the flywheel fit with what you’re deeply passionate about—especially the guiding core purpose and endurin...

Does the flywheel build upon what you can be the best...

Does the flywheel help fuel your economic or ...

Organizations without the components of a flywheel already in place—such as early-stage entrepreneurial companies—can sometimes jump-start the process by importing insights from flywheels that others have built.

A flywheel need not be entirely unique. Two successful organizations can have similar flywheels.

What matters most is how well you understand your flywheel and how well you execute on each component over a long series of iterations.

To be clear, the big winners in corporate history consistently surpassed a threshold level of innovation required to compete in their industries.

But what truly set the big winners apart was their ability to turn initial success into a sustained flywheel, even if they started out behind the pioneers.9

The next flywheel step flows from a rigorous constraint.

Most ideas—even many great ideas—have to be cut in the end.

The very nature of a flywheel—that it depends upon getting the sequence right and that every component depends on all the other components—means that you simply cannot falter on any primary component and sustain momentum.

The flywheel, when properly conceived and executed, creates both continuity and change.

On the one hand, you need to stay with a flywheel long enough to get its full compounding effect.

On the other hand, to keep the flywheel spinning, you need to continually renew, and improv...

There are two possible explanations for a stalled or stuck flywheel.

Possible explanation #1: The underlying flywheel is just fine, but you’re failing to innovate and execute brilliantly on every single component; the flywheel needs to be reinvigorated.

Possible explanation #2: The underlying flywheel no longer fits reality and must be chang...

It’s imperative that you make the rig...

Over the long course of time (multiple decades), a flywheel might evolve significantly.

You might replace components. You might delete components.

You might revise components. You might narrow or broaden the scope of a component. You ...

Or they might happen by a process wherein you confront the brutal facts and practice productive paranoia about existential threats to your flywheel.

That said, if you feel compelled to continuously make fundamental changes to the sequence or components of the flywheel, you’ve likely failed to get your flywheel right in the first place.

More often, momentum stalls due to either poor execution and/or failure to renew and extend within a fundamentally sound flywheel architecture.

The big successes tended to make big bets after they’d empirically validated that the bet would pay off, whereas the less successful comparisons tended to make big bets before having empirical validation.

They crank the flywheel in their first arena of success, while simultaneously firing bullets to discover new things that might work, and as a hedge against uncertainty.

When does a new activity become a second flywheel, as distinct from an extension?

Most seeming “second flywheels” come about organically, as bullet-to-cannonball extensions of a primary flywheel.