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Why Some Firms Go From Good to Great and Stay Great — And Why Others Don’t — Part #2
Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t
Strategy doesn’t ensure greatness, nor does technology or acquisitions. Great companies thrive in pedestrian industries. Greatness doesn’t result from big launch events, motivational programs or management upheavals. Collins found that the transformation from “Good to Great” evolves in a careful, deliberate cycle of development followed by a leap forward. This process functions within the “Flywheel,” a holistic frame of accumulated “effort applied in a consistent direction.”
“The Flywheel and the Doom Loop”
When CEO Alan Wurtzel took over Circuit City in 1973, it was near bankruptcy. He and his team developed the company’s warehouse-retailing concept slowly. In the late 1970s, they converted its traditional stereo and electronics stores into superstores. The superstore concept took hold and built momentum through the 1980s and ’90s. The Circuit City pattern of development and growth offers a good-to-great paradigm. Its success sprang from a gradual buildup, the cumulative effect of small victories and good decisions made over time. It never had a meteoric rise or a “miracle moment” — such as a single transformational development. This pattern of steady “buildup and…
