Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great

But how to turn a single product into a sustained flywheel, especially as a garage start-up? Gentes studied Nike and gleaned an essential insight. There’s a hierarchy of social influence for athletic gear. If, for instance, you get a Tour de France winner to wear your helmet, serious nonprofessional cyclists will want to wear that helmet, which the

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

Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed

When you have disciplined people, you don’t need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you create a powerful mixture that correlates with great performance.

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.

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.

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

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

apply that understanding with creativity and discipline, you get the power of strategic compounding.