Good to Great – How do you do it? Transformation lessons on eggs, flywheels, buses and hedgehogs...

In the words of Jim Collins, I want to give you a lobotomy about change.

How many of you have heard about Jim Collins and his book Good to Great?

This book is about business transformation or in other words creating large-scale corporate change. Jim Collins and his team researched 1,435 good companies and examined their performance over 40 years.

Guess what? Only 11 of these companies became great.

So, forget everything you’ve ever learned about what it takes to create great results because it’s nothing but myths.

In each of these 11 dramatic, remarkable, good-to-great corporate transformations, Jim and his research team found the same thing.

There was no miracle moment of change. Instead, a down-to-earth, pragmatic, committed-to-excellence process—a framework—kept each company, its leaders, and its people on track for the long haul.

There are four lessons on business transformation in Jim’s book. These are lessons on eggs, flywheels, buses and hedgehogs. I bet you’re curious now!

Let me start with the first lesson. It’s about how change does not happen.

Everyone seems to look for the miracle moment when change happens. But if you were to ask the good to great executives when change happened for them – They would not be able to pinpoint a single key event.

Picture an egg. Day after day, it sits there. No one pays attention to it. No one notices it. Then one day, the shell cracks open and out jumps a chicken.

While the outside world was ignoring this seemingly dormant egg, the chicken within was evolving, growing, developing and changing. The moment of breakthrough, the cracking of the egg, was simply one more step in a long chain of steps that had led to that moment.

So, how does change happen? Let’s get into the second lesson. I’d like you to now picture a huge, heavy flywheel. It’s a massive, metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle. Think of it as 100 feet in diameter, 10 feet thick, and it weighs about 25 tons.

Picture it as a company. The job is to get that flywheel to move as fast as possible because momentum is what will generate superior results.

Right now, the flywheel is at a standstill. To get it moving will take tremendous effort. You push with all your might, and finally you get the flywheel to inch forward. You keep pushing, and maybe after a couple days of sustained effort, you get it to complete one entire turn.

It takes a lot of work, but if you keep pushing steadily, each turn moves faster and faster and then at some point, and you won’t be able to say exactly when, but you breakthrough.

The momentum of the heavy flywheel kicks in your favour, and now you aren’t pushing any harder, but the flywheel is accelerating, its momentum is building, and its speed increasing. This is the Flywheel Effect, and it’s what it feels like when you’re inside a company that makes the transition from good to great.

There are no change programs or motivational stunts in these great companies. Instead, it’s about turning the flywheel gradually and consistently, and building tangible evidence that a company’s plans make sense and deliver results.

You might be asking – Why does the Flywheel Effect work? Here’s what Jim Collins says…

Because more than anything else, real people in real companies want to be part of a winning team. They want to contribute to producing real results. They want to feel the excitement and the satisfaction of being part of something that just flat-out works. When people begin to feel the magic of momentum – when they begin to see tangible results and can feel the flywheel start to build speed – that’s when they line up, throw their shoulders to the wheel, and push.

And that’s how change really happens.

In his book, Jim goes on to teach us about the third lesson of going from good-to-great. It’s about the who before the what.

Think of yourself as a bus driver. The bus, your company, is at a standstill, and it’s your job to get it going. You’re going to need to decide where you are going, how you are going to get there and who’s going with you.

Leaders of companies that go from good to great start not with where but with who. They start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats. And they stick with that discipline. First the people, then the direction – No matter how dire the circumstances.

The right people are self-motivated and adaptable. If you have the wrong people on the bus, nothing else matters. Great vision with mediocre people still produces mediocre results.

The final lesson on good to great companies is the Hedgehog Concept. There’s an ancient Greek parable that distinguishes between foxes, which know many small things, and hedgehogs, which know one big thing.

Turns out, all good to great leaders are hedgehogs. They know how to simplify a complex world into a single, organizing idea. The kind of basic principle that unifies, organizes and guides all decisions. On average, it took four years for the good to great companies to crystallize their Hedgehog Concepts. It’s an inherently repetitive process. Consisting of piercing questions, vigorous debate, resolute action and autopsies without blame. A cycle repeated over and over by the right people.

One good to great CEO began this process by asking the question “Why have we sucked for 100 years?”.

Equally important is to have a stop doing list – That is, good to great leaders distinguish themselves by their unyielding discipline to stop doing anything and everything that does not fit tightly within their Hedgehog Concept.

It took Jim Collins and his team, five years of dedicated research to uncover these four lessons. Lessons on eggs, flywheels, buses and hedgehogs. He’s also convinced, just as I am, that the good to great findings apply broadly to you and me in whatever work we’re engaged in, including the work of our own lives.

SOURCE: Collins, J. (2001). Good to great. HarperCollins Publishers.

SOURCE: https://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to-great.html.

© Brooke Somers (2022)