Turning The Flywheel

"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.” - Jim Collins

INTRODUCTION

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• "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 upon another. This is how you build greatness."
• "Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate accelerate the loop."
• "Notice how each component in the Vanguard flywheel isn't merely a "next action step on list" but almost an inevitable consequence of the step that came before."
• "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.”
• "But to do so requires understanding the underlying architecture of the flywheel as distinct from a single line of business or arena of activity."
• "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."
• "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 resource engine."
• "A flywheel need not be entirely unique. Two successful organizations can have similar flywheels. What matters most is how well you understand your flywheel and how well you execute on each component over a long series of iterations."
• "The very nature of a flywheel-that it depends upon getting the sequence right and that every component depends on all the other components means that you simply cannot falter on any primary component and sustain momentum."
• "enduring great companies reject the "Tyranny of the OR" (the view that things must be either A OR B but not both). Instead, they liberate themselves with the "Genius of the AND""
• "There are two possible explanations for a stalled or stuck flywheel. Possible explanation #1: The underlying flywheel is just fine, but you're failing to innovate and execute brilliantly on every single component; the flywheel needs to be reinvigorated. Possible explanation #2: The underlying flywheel no longer fits reality and must be changed in some significant way. It's imperative that you make the right diagnosis."
• "Over the long course of time (multiple decades), a flywheel might evolve significantly. You might replace components. You might delete components. You might revise components. You might narrow or broaden the scope of a component. You might adjust the sequence. These changes might happen by a process of invention, as you discover or create fundamentally new activities or businesses."
• "The big successes tended to make big bets after they'd empirically validated that the bet would pay off, whereas the less successful comparisons tended to make big bets before having empirical validation. We coined the concept fire bullets, then cannonballs to capture the difference."
• "The most important thing is to keep turning the overall flywheel - and every component and sub-flywheel - with creative intensity and relentless discipline."
• "In our research for How the Mighty Fall, we found that the demise of once-great companies happens in five stages: (1) Hubris Born of Success, (2) Undisciplined Pursuit of More, (3) Denial of Risk and Peril, (4) Grasping for Salvation, and (5) Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death."
• "True discipline requires the independence of mind to reject pressures to conform in ways incompatible with values, performance standards, and long-term aspirations."
• "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."
• "Great vision without great people is irrelevant."
• "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."
• "The ability to scale innovation--to turn small, proven ideas (bullets) into huge successes (cannonballs)-can provide big bursts of momentum. First, you fire bullets (low-cost, low-risk, low-distraction experiments) to figure out what will work-calibrating your line of sight by taking small shots. Then, once you have empirical validation, you fire a cannonball (concentrating resources into a big bet) on the calibrated line of sight."
• "The only mistakes you can learn from are the ones you survive."
• "Leaders who build enduring great companies tend to be clock builders, not time tellers."
• "Finally, there's a principle that amplifies all the other principles in the framework, the principle of return on luck. Instead, they got a higher return on luck, making more of their luck than others. The critical question is not, will you get luck? But what will you do with the luck that you get?"
• "Greatness is an inherently dynamic process, not an end point. The moment you think of yourself as great, your slide toward mediocrity will have already begun."

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