TURNING THE FLYWHEEL

Hi there. Jim Collins here and I’m excited to share my latest publication.

It’s called Turning the Flywheel.

It’s a monograph to accompany Good to Great. The monograph begins with the story of Amazon.com grabbing the flywheel concept. Coming out of the dot-com bust in 2001, after being taught the idea, but then taking it to another level and saying what we need to do is to capture the drivers in our flywheel. Crystalize the components of our flywheel. And then turn that flywheel to build relentless momentum. –unstoppable momentum. The Amazon case is an architype of a spectacularly powerful flywheel. And it’s the starting point of this conversation. But what it really leads to is the idea that to get full power out of the flywheel principle, it’s very helpful to rigorously ask the questions “How does our flywheel turn? What are the components in our flywheel? What’s the sequence in the flywheel? How can we do for ourselves what Amazon did for itself?”

Now your flywheel will almost certainly be different than Amazon’s, but as we point out in the monograph, it’s logic should be equally sound—equally compelling. The monograph moves on to share flywheels from a range of types of organizations. We look at small companies, health care organizations, non-profits, arts organizations. And there’s even the delightful discovery of a rural elementary school, articulating and turning a flywheel so that children learn.

Throughout Turning the Flywheel, I will share new intellectual insights that have become clear in the years since writing Good to Great about the Flywheel principle and my own practical guidance for you about how you might take the idea and make it yours.

I hope you enjoy it. But most importantly, I hope you rigorously apply it. Begin thinking today, how does your flywheel turn?

Copyright © 2019 Jim Collins, All rights reserved.