Taking the 'flywheel' to success: How Jim Collins helped Bezos become a billionaire

Jeff Bezos may be worth $115 billion today but life would have been very different for the Amazon founder if not for a book — Jim Collins’s 'Good to Great' — published in October 2001. The lessons Bezos took from it had a monumental impact on Amazon’s trajectory.

In a recent podcast, author Collins recalled how Bezos called him for advice in the wake of the 2000 dot-com bust when Amazon was struggling to turn a profit. When Collins met Bezos’s executive team, he took them through the learnings from his book, namely the flywheel — the idea that each part of the business reinforces and accelerates the other parts. “Now the wonderful thing about great students, and Jeff Bezos and company are really thoughtful smart people, is they take an idea even further. So, they took the flywheel and they said we’re going to make the flywheel ours,” he recalled, explaining how Amazon turned its first profits soon.