With the collision of four major forces; increasing world population, the global flow of capital and trades, accelerating technological impact and the rise of emerging markets, the global economy is on the rise. This has led to generating multiple opportunities for most, while challenges for some, and pressure to learn and keep updated for everyone.
The rate of development in digital technologies is transforming the businesses and leading to the new wave of innovations. With limited resources to invest, the technologies are allowing businesses to start and gain huge profits at a steady pace. This leads to disruption in the businesses.
The successful businesses have been able to turn their flywheel from ten times to billions of times. This is a better strategy than to turn it to ten times and then shifting to a new flywheel. With the latter, the businesses push the flywheel for ten turns and then they divert their energy to an all-new flywheel. Once you can turn your flywheel to ten turns, then try to target hundreds, then thousands and so on.
You need to put in your discipline and creativity at every turn and you should always go with your full intensity and efforts as you put in your first few turns. This will help your business get the recognition and earn a place amongst those few businesses who could make it from good to great and could also sustain their performance to the last.
Table of Contents
How to Create your Disruptive Strategic Flywheels
Here is a step by step guide to building a disruptive strategic flywheel for your business.
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Create a list of successes that your business has achieved
A replicable success can be the variations on essential ideas. For example, Vanguard created many low-cost mutual funds, consistent with their flywheel created. Creating a replicable success can be more difficult than it may sound. This would need a lot of time and efforts from your business.
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Create a list of disappointments and failures
This would include the new offerings and initiatives that your business fell short of expectations or failed outright. The process can be easier and you might be able to create a list of disappointments your business has faced in recent times. As we learn more from our failures than from our successes, failures are also easier to identify.
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Compare the success of your business with the failures
This will help you analyze the possible components that need to be included in your flywheel. You can compare what is in it and what needs to be added into it. List out what is common in all the failures and in all the successes your business faced. Comparing the lists will also help you recognize the pattern between the failures and the successes.
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Sketch the flywheel based on the components identified in the previous step
What comes at the top of the wheel? Where should you start? What will be next? And so on. Each component of the flywheel needs to be independent and should feel like a different stage. Create a path to be followed back to the first stage. To create a loop that could cycle back and start again. In every cycle, it should accelerate the momentum. Put in a lot of effort that would include debate and discussions with your team and experts. You need to make sure that every stage in your flywheel should be correct. Sketching each stage of your flywheel can require a lot of time.
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Try to use four to six components in your entire flywheels loop
With six or more components, your flywheel loop can become too complicated. Keep the model simplified and capture the flywheel’s essence. The Fast Office Furniture recommends keeping the stages of the flywheel between four to six to create a simplified, easy and accurate flywheel for your business. With more number of stages, the flywheel complicates and it becomes difficult to analyze the success.
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Test your designed flywheels against the failures and successes
Evaluate the flywheels with your empirical experience. Assess and modify the wheel design until the flywheel can explain the biggest replicable successes your business can achieve as an outcome from each turn of your flywheel. And, failing do execute or adhering to the flywheel may result in the biggest disappointment and failure for your business. The best way to evaluate the effectiveness of the flywheel is to test against the failures and successes.
By successfully designing and implementing the disruptive strategic flywheels, the businesses can leap from good to great. The implementation and execution of the flywheel would need disciplined thoughts, actions, people and all these to produce a superior result for your business.
