When legendary manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, took over Manchester United Football (soccer) Club in 1986, the club hadn’t won a league title in 20 years. His first move wasn’t a splashy signing. As he details in Leading, he overhauled the youth academy, restructured scouting, and changed how players trained day to day. It took four years before United won a trophy — but those small, compounding investments produced 38 trophies over 26 years.

Ferguson didn’t transform Manchester United with one big move. He did it by getting marginally better every season and trusting the process to compound. In other words, he built organizational momentum.

The corporate parallel to momentum in sports

The same principle applies to business transformations — but most organizations focus on the wrong thing. They pour energy into designing the strategy and then celebrate when the results arrive. The part that gets neglected is the middle: the sustained, unglamorous execution that connects the plan to the outcome. Eighty-nine percent of consultants agree that transformations are most likely to fail from execution gaps. The strategy is rarely the problem. The work loses velocity in the middle.

The pattern is familiar. A business announces an ambitious transformation. The first 90 days are electric with new hires, vendor selections, and quick wins. Then cross-functional dependencies surface. Legacy systems resist. The executive sponsor gets pulled into the next crisis. Someone calls for a “pause” to realign.

Before long, the transformation becomes another initiative du jour. Every pause hands momentum back to the status quo. Former Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly has likened a turnaround to riding a bicycle — you need to keep pedaling to steer. You can’t steer from a standstill. And as Joly has noted, you can’t rally an organization around values and vision until you’ve demonstrated progress first: people need to see momentum before they believe in it.

How the best operators sustain momentum

Sustaining velocity requires more than a strong start; it demands a deliberate focus on the systems and habits inside the organization. By aggressively clearing the path of legacy friction and installing new, repeatable rhythms, leaders move from pushing an initiative to managing a self-reinforcing rhythm. This shift from mandate to momentum is built on two primary elements:

Paying down operational debt early

Every organization carries operational debt — neglected legacy systems, orphaned processes, workarounds nobody wants to own. Left unaddressed, it compounds and slows everything around it.

Best Buy under Joly is a good example. Before pursuing growth, his team tackled unglamorous issues first — reducing damages on shipped flat-screen TVs and freeing up cash through non-salary cost reductions. The company cut $765M in selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) costs over two years. Those early wins cleared the runway for the customer experience investments that followed.

By paying down this debt, leaders stop fighting the past and start funding the future.

Building habits, not heroics

In Atomic Habits, James Clear refers to the idea of momentum as “habit stacking” — attaching a new behavior to an existing routine. Research from University College London found it takes an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic. We often find the same parallel when it comes to getting teams in the rhythm of operating in a new form or fashion.

The most effective leaders we’ve worked with embed transformation decisions into the cadence that already exists and provide support from the top. They also use that rhythm to recognize the people doing the hard work.

One C-level executive we know encouraged her team to send at least one email every Friday thanking a specific team member for their contributions that week. This is Joly’s principle in practice — a small, visible moment of progress that shows the organization the transformation is real. Those moments compound into the kind of buy-in that keeps a transformation going.

The compounding effect

Ferguson built Manchester United’s dynasty the same way Joly rebuilt Best Buy — not through one dramatic gesture but through marginal improvements that compounded over time. Ferguson’s early years were unglamorous: academy restructuring, scouting changes, training adjustments. Joly’s were equally mundane: shipping damage reduction, non-salary cost cuts. In both cases, the early discipline created the foundation for everything that followed.

If your current initiative feels stuck, resist the temptation to revisit the strategy. Look at the physics of your execution instead — your cadence, your operational debt, and whether your team feels the momentum or just the mandate.