Good to Great

I’ve been reading Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Other's Don't by Jim Collins. This isn’t the kind of book that I usually read... it has no pictures. I generally resist viewing church through a business model, but Collins book is really about organizations, not business.

Collins’ research team identified 11 companies that followed a pattern of “fifteen-year cumulative stock returns at or below the general stock market, punctuated by a transition point, then cumulative returns at least three times the market over the next fifteen years.” In other words, he studied companies that had been average for a long time and then made a transition to great. He also studied related companies in similar positions that made no such transition. For example, Walgreen’s and Eckerd’s were almost identical drugstore chains for years before Walgreen’s became one of the success stories while Eckerd did not. Collins asks “Why?” What was the transition point that allowed Walgreen's and other companies to go from good to great? Why was true about the "great companies" that was not true of the “comparison companies?”

Collins and his team found six key things that separate the good from the great. One of these is “the Flywheel Effect.” He asks us to imagine a massive, metal disk on an axle 100 feet in diameter, 10 feet thick and weighing 25 tons. Your job is to get that flywheel to move as fast as possible. The only way to do that is to move it inch by inch by a series of pushes. It hardly moves at first, but gradually momentum builds. The faster it turns, the easier it is to make it turn… and the faster it goes. He asks, “Which push is the most important push?” His point is that there was no single push in the great companies he studied. Not only could leaders in those companies point to a transition moment in time, they resisted the fact that there was one! There was no charismatic leader who turned things around. In fact, Collins argues that charismatic Lee Iacocca-type leaders can be a hindrance to long term success. Leaders in the great companies were generally the humble, quiet-resolve types who had the strength of character to keep going inch by inch doing the things that lead to long term success. Companies that relied on quick acquisitions and gimmicky technology usually failed in the long term.

I think this illustrates something for us. The Bible is filled with words that encourage to just keep turning the flywheel. Paul told the Thessalonians, “And as for you, brothers, never tire of doing what is right” (2 Thess 3:13). He says to the Galatians, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (Gal 6:9). John told Christians suffering for their faith, “This calls for patient endurance on the part of the saints who obey God’s commandments and remain faithful to Jesus” (Rev 14:12). We are called to patience and endurance. We are called to stand. The successful Christian life is rarely marked by dramatic watershed moment where we gain deep insights with absolute clarity or win great victories that define our faith for now and forever. No, we simply keep spinning the flywheel in faithfulness, putting our trust in God. In the end, faithfulness over time is the true measure of the success of the Christian life.