Hey there!

Today, we are wrapping up Good to Great. There is a ton of data in this book and many stories that I couldn’t share

• The Flywheel: A cool analogy to help you understand how these companies build momentum

• Build up to breakthrough: It's not an overnight success, it's all about the small steps that add up

• Commitment, alignment & managing change: Why these factors are way more important than they seem

Let's get started! 🚀

estimated read time: 5 minutes

The Flywheel

So, imagine you've got this gigantic flywheel, right? It's like 30 feet across, 2 feet thick, and weighs a whopping 5,000 pounds. And your job is to get this bad boy spinning as fast and for as long as you can.

You start pushing with all your might, and it barely moves. But you don't give up. After a couple of hours of non-stop effort, you finally manage to get it to make one full rotation.

You keep at it, pushing in the same direction, and it starts to pick up a little speed. Two rotations, then three, four, five, six... the flywheel starts to gain some serious momentum. Seven, eight, nine, ten... it's going faster with every turn... twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred.

And then, bam! Breakthrough! The momentum kicks in, and the flywheel takes off like a rocket, spinning faster and faster. Its own weight is now working in your favor, and you're not even pushing any harder than you were at the beginning. Every rotation builds on the work you've already done, so your effort gets compounded over time. It's like a snowball effect—faster and faster, a thousand times, ten thousand times, a hundred thousand times.

Now, if someone were to come up and ask you, "Hey, which push made this thing go so fast?" you'd be like, "Uh, that's not really how it works." There's no one big push that did it. It's the sum of all those pushes, big and small, that you've been putting in consistently in the same direction. Sure, some pushes might have been stronger than others, but every single one of them mattered and contributed to the overall momentum of the flywheel.

Build up to breakthrough

There's no magical, instant change – it's a bunch of small steps, actions, and decisions that add up to some seriously amazing results.

But if you were to read about these companies in the media, you'd probably get a totally different impression. Most of the time, the media doesn't even pay attention to a company until their flywheel is already spinning like crazy. That's when it starts to look like these companies transformed overnight, which is totally not the case.

Take Circuit City, for example. They had their first big media moment in a 1984 Forbes article, which made it seem like they were this hot new company that just came out of nowhere. But the truth is, their journey to greatness had been a decade in the making. The CEO, Alan Wurtzel, took over the company when it was on the brink of bankruptcy. He and his team worked hard, made some bold moves, and eventually came up with the successful Circuit City store concept.

The funny thing is, Circuit City was barely on anyone's radar before their big breakthrough. We hardly found any articles about them from the decade leading up to their transformation. But after they started crushing it, the media was all over them. There were almost three times more articles about Circuit City in the decade after their breakthrough compared to the decade before.

And that's the deal with these good-to-great stories. The media doesn't usually catch on until the companies are already crushing it. So it looks like they just popped up out of nowhere, even though they've been grinding away, turning that flywheel, step by step, for years.

Commitment, alignment & managing change

Jim Collins has this funny story from the research. At a crucial point in the study, his research team was super frustrated. They threw their interview notes on the table and asked, "Do we have to keep asking that dumb question?"

Jim was like, "What dumb question?"

They said, "The one about commitment, alignment, and managing change."

Jim replied, "That's not a dumb question. It's super important."

One team member said, "Well, a lot of the execs who made the transition think it's a dumb question. Some don't even get it!"

Jim insisted, "Yeah, we need to keep asking it. We gotta be consistent in our interviews. Plus, it's even more interesting that they don't get the question. Keep probing. We need to figure out how they overcame resistance to change and got people on board."

Jim totally thought that getting everyone on the same page would be a huge challenge for leaders trying to turn good companies into great ones. But, surprise, surprise, it wasn't really a big issue for the good-to-great leaders.

Sure, those companies got amazing commitment and alignment, but they never really spent much time thinking about it. It just happened naturally. They learned that under the right conditions, issues like commitment, alignment, motivation, and change just sort themselves out.

Take Kroger, for example. How do you get a company of over 50,000 people to embrace a totally new strategy that changes almost everything about how they run grocery stores? The answer: you don't. At least not with one big event or program.

Jim Herring, the top-dog leader who started Kroger's transformation, told them he steered clear of hype and motivational stuff. Instead, he and his team just started turning the flywheel, showing everyone that their plans were legit. He said, "We presented what we were doing in such a way that people saw our accomplishments. We tried to bring our plans to a successful conclusion step by step, so that the mass of people would gain confidence from the successes, not just the words." He knew that the best way to get people on board with a bold new vision was to keep turning that flywheel.

The good-to-great companies didn't make a big fuss about their goals at first. They just started turning the flywheel, going from understanding to action, step by step. Once the flywheel picked up speed, they'd be like, "Hey, if we just keep pushing this thing, there's no reason we can't achieve X."

Conclusion

And that's a wrap, folks! We've explored some key takeaways from Good to Great, and we hope you've enjoyed this conversational journey through flywheels, building momentum, and the importance of commitment, alignment, and managing change.

Remember, it's all about the small steps that lead to massive results. So, let's keep pushing our own flywheels and strive to be the best version of ourselves, whether in business or our personal lives. 🌟

Thank you for joining us on this adventure, and we hope you had a blast. Stay tuned for more fun and insightful reads! Catch you on the flip side! 😄

p.s.

Thanks Jim! We will take a look at How the Mighty Fall and Built to Last later.