Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great

When you’re facing chaos and uncertainty, and you cannot possibly predict what’s coming around the corner, your best “strategy” is to have a busload of people who can adapt and perform brilliantly no matter what comes next.

Compare the successes to the disappointments and

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

Organizations without the components of a flywheel already in place—such as early-stage entrepreneurial companies—can sometimes jump-start the process by importing insights from flywheels that others have built.

This forms the backbone of the framework, laid out as four basic stages: Stage 1: Disciplined People Stage 2: Disciplined Thought Stage 3: Disciplined Action Stage 4: Building to Last Each of the four stages consists of two or three fundamental principles. The flywheel principle falls at a central point in the framework, right at the pivot point fr

Test the flywheel against your list of successes and disappointments. Does your empirical

Create a list of significant replicable successes your enterprise has achieved. This should include new initiatives and offerings that have far exceeded expectations.

Robert Burgelman once observed to a classroom full of students in 1982 (of which I was one), the greatest danger in business and life lies not in outright failure but in achieving success without understanding why you were successful in the first place.

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.

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