.......a journey called life

If you guys have read the book "Good to Great", you probably know what I am talking about. Those who haven't must read it and those who don't have any intent of reading it in the near future, read my commentary on the book (LINK - Go to the last book review in the page, LINK 2).

Having sorted it out, let me come to the point. In the last week or so, I have got 2 compliments. One on this blog and the other on my LinkedIn Profile. Both the compliments were on similar lines - "How did you build it? It looks so complete". I am not taking pride in these compliments but I just thought I would try to decipher if there is any answer to such questions. Bottom line is that these things are built over time and small incremental improvements help you build it. Then I thought that Jim Collin's Flywheel Concept gives a better answer to this question.

He says that any phenomenal change in its final state looks like a flywheel going at a very fast speed. People stop to question what kind of effort would bring that flywheel to such impressive speed where things seem to be happening just by themselves. He further explains that such movements are brought by one step at a time.

Imagine a giant flywheel....

Case 1: You apply immense force to rotate it and it doesn't move but you persevere and you get it moving by an inch. You continue applying force to it and finally you make it complete a turn. Nobody notices but you know what you are up to. You continue applying force in the same direction until it attains a speed which people stop to notice. They believe that a massive restructuring program must have gone under to bring it to such speed. Take the case of Kimberly Clark under the leadership of Darwin Smith which took 25 years to turn the flywheel to a speed which was envied by the competitors

Case 2: You try very hard to rotate the flywheel but could not move it. You form a team to make it move and they succeed in moving it by one rotation. Then you shift your focus for some time and when you come back to check the flywheel, you the speed dying. You form another team to make it move again but in a different direction. You keep shifting direction as you dont quite know what you are doing. In the end, what you get is a slow moving flywheel alternating direction more often than not.

Need I say more?

NOTE: If you smell hubris by reading this post, please excuse me as I am a person full of humility and in this post, I have just tried to link the Flywheel Concept in a real life situation