Flywheel

Video Transcript

Remember we wrote in Good to Great that big things happen by pushing on a giant, heavy flywheel. You start pushing in an intelligent and consistent direction, and after a lot of work you get one giant, slow, creaky turn, but you don’t stop. You keep pushing and you eventually get two turns and four and sixteen and thirty-two and sixty-four and one hundred and one thousand; pushing; cumulative, consistent momentum; and at one point it’s one hundred thousand and then a million turns in that flywheel. Big things happen because you do a bunch of little things supremely well that compound over time. This is what we learned. We see tremendous consistency in any truly great enterprise. The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change—although, and we’ll get to this, if you don’t change, you become irrelevant—but the true signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.