I’ve come to see the flywheel effect as one of the most important strategic principles to come from all of our research into why some companies become great, why some fail to become great, and why some fall from greatness. The big winners are those that take a flywheel from ten turns to a billion turns rather than crank through ten turns, start ove

To do good work you have to take these cycles into account, because they’re affected by how you react to them. When you’re driving a car with a manual transmission on a hill, you have to back off the clutch sometimes to avoid stalling. Backing off can likewise prevent ambition from stalling.