Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great

If you have more than six components, you’re making it too complicated; consolidate and simplify to capture the essence of the flywheel.

Great by Choice. Morten and I systematically studied small entrepreneurial companies that became the 10X winners

the Stockdale Paradox: Retain absolute faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time, exercise the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be. This concept is fully developed in the book Good to Great.

Test the flywheel against the three circles of your Hedgehog Concept. A Hedgehog Concept is a simple, crystalline concept that flows from deeply understanding the intersection of the following three circles: (1) what you’re deeply passionate about, (2) what you can be the best in the world at, and (3) what drives your economic or

companies react to disappointing results without discipline—grasping for a new savior, program, fad, event, or direction—only to experience more disappointment.

The critical question is not, will you get luck? But what will you do with the luck that you get? If you get a high return on a luck event, it can add a big boost of momentum to the flywheel. Conversely, if you are ill-prepared to absorb a bad-luck event, it can stall or imperil the flywheel. This concept is fully developed in the book Great by Cho

As Gerard Tellis and Peter Golder demonstrated in their book, Will and Vision, the pioneering innovators in a new business arena almost never (less than 10 percent of the time) become the big winners in the end.

Instead, Amazon committed fully to its flywheel and then innovated aggressively within that flywheel to build and accelerate momentum. Amazon

Think of it this way. Suppose you have, say, six components in the flywheel, and you score your performance in each from 1 to 10. What happens if your execution scores are 9, 10, 8, 3, 9, and 10? The entire flywheel stalls at the component scoring 3. To regain momentum, you need to bring that 3 up to at least an 8.