Turning the Flywheel

Turning the Flywheel is the accompaniment to the very good From Good To Great by Jim Collins.

The focus of the monograph is on the concept of a flywheel – a metaphor Jim Collins uses to illustrate how very successful businesses build a self perpetuating structure to drive business growth. The monograph provides the framework for assessing and building a flywheel for any venture, and shows how this is not only applicable to the world of business.

B>llets

• The flywheel is a ‘virtuous cycle’ that drives business growth
• Businesses which have become major successes have not done so through a ‘killer app’ but rather through the process of designing the underlying structures of their flywheel to drive this growth.
• A properly calibrated flywheel should be self perpetuating – if you do X, you cant help but do Y
• Feed any part of your flywheel model and it should accelerate
• Flywheel does not have to be unique and you can follow models used elsewhere
• Big success stories tend to make big bets after they have validated empirically that the bet would pay off
• “fire bullets, then cannon balls” – make small bets and then capitalise on your successes

External Links

• JimCollins.com
• Jim Collins Wiki
• Jim on Twitter