“Sure. It’s my husband sitting on the couch watching a sporting event on the television.”
“The dictionary says it’s ‘the resistance or disinclination to motion, action, or change’.”
“That’s him all right.”
“Today we’re going to talk about inertia—specifically about the CEO pushing a flywheel.”
“Golly, Curmudge. A couple of weeks ago we had him driving a bus and getting the right people on it and the wrong people off. Haven’t we given him enough headaches without adding a hernia from pushing a flywheel?”
“Don’t worry, Julie. Our story will just be an allegory.”
“An alle…what? Oh well. It will probably just be a symbolic narrative. So where did this flywheel stuff come from, anyway?”
“Jim Collins and Quint Studer both use flywheels to illustrate the reality that one can’t jump from bad to good or good to great in one dramatic leap. A slow, relentless buildup must precede the acceleration to operational excellence that we are seeking.”
“That makes sense, but is it accurately depicted by a flywheel?”
“I wondered that too, so I built an imaginary flywheel, created some sample data, and grabbed an old textbook to see if classical physics supported Jim Collin’s ‘hockey stick’ figures. My ‘flywheel’ is a limestone grindstone mounted horizontally on a vertical axis.”
“Just like in Biblical times when people or animals pushed the stone around and around.”
“Right, Julie. But in our story, it is our hardworking CEO starting to push the stone all by himself. The speed of the stone’s rotation represents the organization’s progress toward greatness. Assuming the bearing is frictionless, the CEO’s relentless pushing builds up momentum slowly.”
“Of course when the bearing is old and rusty, the lone pusher gets a hernia.”
“The breakthrough occurs when the CEO gets more people to help push, with their number, in my example, doubling every five minutes. A plot of speed of rotation vs. time then looks like a hockey stick, so a flywheel is an acceptable model. The dramatic bend upward depends on more and more people joining the effort. That’s what happens in a real organization as more of the staff realize that a Lean culture is their goal. Take a look at the plot of my model.”
“Your values for rotational speed are awfully high, Curmudge, but I suppose that’s because frictionless flywheels aren’t very realistic.”
“We might view the unavoidable friction in a real flywheel as representing those people who persistently resist change. If we don’t continue to push, friction and the skeptics will take over. The plot will take a nosedive, and our Lean transformation will become just another ‘program of the month’.”
"Thanks for the flywheel physics, Curmudge, but what must a real CEO do to turn the corner and move her organization toward excellence?”
“Our story will be continued, Julie. Meanwhile, please return my physics book, and I’ll put it back on the shelf to collect more dust.”
“See you in class, Professor.”
Affinity’s Kaizen Curmudgeon
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