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The Flywheel in Action at Demand Media: Building Greatness One Turn at a Time
The best-selling book “Good to Great” by Jim Collins is like the bible for greatness here at Demand Media. We constantly refer to many of the concepts introduced in its pages when teaching our team members how to be truly great – Level 5 Leadership, First Who Then What, Culture of Discipline, Confront the Brutal Facts and most importantly The Flywheel and The Doom Loop. In this post, I’d like to focus on The Flywheel.
The concept of The Flywheel uses an analogy to explain that building a great company doesn’t just happen overnight, but rather requires years of continuous, cumulative effort. (Collins himself describes the concept in detail in this audio clip.) It isn’t one killer innovation or defining moment that creates success, but rather many small, momentum-building events compounding and building on each over time that form the foundation of true greatness. Collins illustrates this visually as an enormous, heavy flywheel that is initially very difficult to get moving, showing barely discernible progress no matter how much energy you expend trying to push it forward. However, with steady, sustained effort, you finally turn the wheel one revolution, then another, and another. With each turn, the flywheel starts to pick up speed, until finally its momentum begins to work in your favor. When that happens, Collins says, you’re pushing just as hard as you were before, but the wheel radically accelerates as if under its own power. I like to say that the process is evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary. At Demand Media we firmly believe in the concept of The Flywheel and we live it each and everyday. One example is with our site eHow.com. It was one of our company’s first acquisitions and earliest projects, but many people who are just starting to take notice conclude it was an overnight success story. The truth is that it took many days, months and years of extremely hard work, with few early results, to get eHow.com moving in the right direction. We’ve grown eHow.com from 5MM to 48MM unique visitors, but it certainly didn’t happen overnight. We’ve spent three years pushing that flywheel, building to big progress with a series of smaller decisions, implemented and improved upon over time. By consistently growing the eHow community through content and integrated social media, we created a site that’s increasingly generating its own momentum. Recently, the eHow “flywheel” has picked up so much speed that the site is now larger than CNN.com. Our company has lots of examples of turning the flywheel – it’s core to everything we do. As an organization, we’re careful to stress evolution, not revolution. To do that, we launch our products quickly and iterate often, well aware of the lesson that millions of customers always know more than a handful of product managers, marketers or developers. Additionally, we understand that momentum is key, because many solutions can only be discovered along the way, not planned for ahead of time. Small teams and short feedback loops help us bottle up inertia and build upon our previous efforts. In the end, it’s the small daily wins, piled up persistently, that create our great businesses. Joe Perez is Demand Media’s EVP of Product Marketing & Community. Part of the company’s founding team, Joe drives strategy for each of Demand Media’s products as well as marketing and community interaction approaches. Follow Joe on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joeperez
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