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    Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great
    Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great
    Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great
    Ebook61 pages52 minutes

    Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great

    By Jim Collins

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    About this ebook

    A companion guidebook to the number-one bestselling Good to Great, focused on implementation of the flywheel concept, one of Jim Collins’ most memorable ideas that has been used across industries and the social sectors, and with startups.

    The key to business success is not a single innovation or one plan. It is the act of turning the flywheel, slowly gaining momentum and eventually reaching a breakthrough. Building upon the flywheel concept introduced in his groundbreaking classic Good to Great, Jim Collins teaches readers how to create their own flywheel, how to accelerate the flywheel’s momentum, and how to stay on the flywheel in shifting markets and during times of turbulence.

    Combining research from his Good to Great labs and case studies from organizations like Amazon, Vanguard, and the Cleveland Clinic which have turned their flywheels with outstanding results, Collins demonstrates that successful organizations can disrupt the world around them—and reach unprecedented success—by employing the flywheel concept.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 26, 2019
    ISBN9780062933805
    Author

    Jim Collins

    Jim Collins is a student and teacher of what makes great companies tick, and a Socratic advisor to leaders in the business and social sectors. Having invested more than a quarter-century in rigorous research, he has authored or coauthored six books that have sold in total more than 10 million copies worldwide. They include Good to Great, Built to Last, How the Mighty Fall, and Great by Choice. Driven by a relentless curiosity, Jim began his research and teaching career on the faculty at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992. In 1995, he founded a management laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. In addition to his work in the business sector, Jim has a passion for learning and teaching in the social sectors, including education, healthcare, government, faith-based organizations, social ventures, and cause-driven nonprofits. In 2012 and 2013, he had the honor to serve a two-year appointment as the Class of 1951 Chair for the Study of Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point. In 2017, Forbes selected Jim as one of the 100 Greatest Living Business Minds. Jim has been an avid rock climber for more than forty years and has completed single-day ascents of El Capitan and Half Dome in Yosemite Valley. Learn more about Jim and his concepts at his website, where you’ll find articles, videos, and useful tools. jimcollins.com

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      Book preview

      Turning the Flywheel - Jim Collins

      Dedication

      To my personal band of brothers — you know who you are —

      in the spirit of loyalty, love, and enduring friendship.

      Contents

      Cover

      Title Page

      Dedication

      Turning the Flywheel

      Appendix

      Notes

      About the Author

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      Turning the Flywheel

      Beauty does not come from decorative effects but from structural coherence. — Pier Luigi Nervi¹

      In the autumn of 2001, just as Good to Great first hit the market, Amazon.com invited me to engage in a spirited dialogue with founder Jeff Bezos and a few members of his executive team. This was right in the middle of the dot-com bust, when some wondered how (or if) Amazon could recover and prevail as a great company. I taught them about the flywheel effect that we’d uncovered in our research. 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 discipline, you get the power of strategic compounding. Each turn builds upon previous work as you make a series of good decisions, supremely well executed, that compound one upon another. This is how you build greatness.

      The Amazon team grabbed onto the flywheel concept and deployed it to articulate the momentum machine that drove the enterprise at its best. From its inception, Bezos had infused Amazon with an obsession to create ever more value for ever more customers. It’s a powerful animating force—perhaps even a noble purpose—but the key differentiator lay not just in good intent but in the way Bezos and company turned it into a repeating loop. As Brad Stone later wrote in The Everything Store, Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle, which they believed powered their business. It went something like this: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop. And so, the flywheel would turn, building momentum. Push the flywheel; accelerate momentum. Then repeat. Bezos, Stone continued, considered Amazon’s application of the flywheel concept the secret sauce.²

      I’ve sketched my own take on the essence of the original Amazon flywheel in the nearby diagram. (Note: Throughout this monograph, I’ve included sketches of specific flywheels to illustrate the concept. To be clear, these reflect my own take on the flywheel from each case; the leaders who built these flywheels would likely draw them with more nuance than I have. Use these illustrative sketches to grasp the flywheel concept and to stimulate thinking about your own flywheel.)

      Notice the inexorable logic. Trace your way around the

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