As with the most climbs to greatness, it involved sustained, cumulative effort, like turning a giant, heavy flywheel: Each push builds upon previous work, compounding the investment of effort - days, weeks, months and years of work - generating momentum, from one turn to ten, from ten to a hundred, from a hundred to a thousand, from a thousand to a million. Once an organization gets one flywheel going, it might create a second or third flywheel. But to remain successful in any given area of activity, you have to keep pushing with as much intensity as when you first begun building that flywheel, exactly what Circuit City did not do. Circuit City in decline exemplifies a cycle of arrogant neglect that goes like this: 1. You build a successful flywheel. 2. You succumb the notion that new opportunities will sustain your success better than your primary flywheel, either because you face an impending threat or because you find other opportunities more exciting ( or perhaps youre just bored ) 3.You divert your creative attention to new adventures and fail to improve your primary flywheel as if your life depended on it. 4. The new ventures fail outright, siphon off your best creative energy, or take longer to succeed than expected. 5. You turn your creative attention back to your primary flywheel only to find it wobbling and losing momentum. A core business that meets a fundamental human need, and one at which youve become best in the world, rarely becomes obsolete.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 10:38:17 +0000
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