Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has always found ways to leverage technology—whether e-commerce, rockets, drones or cloud computing—to give his company's flywheel another jolt.
Who doesn't want to find the profit-turning flywheel Bezos runs, the one Jim Collins describes in Good to Great?
But the truth is, you don't find it; you cultivate it.
"No matter how dramatic the end result, the good-to-great transformations never happened in one fell swoop," Collins says. "There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no wrenching revolution."
A flywheel is not the creation of the fast-buck "mercenary" (Bezos' term), but of the "missionary"—the patient, purpose-driven businessman or woman.
