Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great

The flywheel, when properly conceived and executed, creates both continuity and change. On the one hand, you need to stay with a flywheel long enough to get its full compounding effect. On the other hand, to keep the flywheel spinning, you need to continually renew, and improve each and every component.

For a truly great company, the Big Thing is never any specific line of business or product or idea or invention. The Big Thing is your underlying flywheel architecture, properly conceived. If you get your flywheel right, it can guide and drive momentum (with renewal and extensions) for at least a decade, and likely much longer. Amazon, Vanguard, an

Notice how each component in the Vanguard flywheel isn’t merely a “next action step on a list” but almost an inevitable consequence of the step that came before. If you offer lower-cost mutual funds, you almost can’t help but deliver superior long-term returns to investors (relative to higher-cost funds that invest in the same assets). And if you d

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 up