Perspective

Last reviewed October 22, 2026

Tilting at windmills is when an owner aims the company's best energy at a big, noble-feeling fight while the unglamorous work the business needs goes undone.

Collins and Hansen's research in Great by Choice points to the fix: fire small, cheap bullets to test the idea, and only fire the cannonball once a bullet has hit.

Almost every owner has a project they light up about. A second location. A new division. The software that's going to fix everything. The acquisition. The job twice the size of anything the company has ever built.

Ask about it and the energy in the room changes. Ask about last month's WIP report, the change orders nobody has billed, or the superintendent who's been carrying three jobs since spring, and it changes back.

That gap is worth paying attention to. Sometimes the big project really is the next step. Often it's a windmill.

A knight on a righteous errand

The scene comes from Part One of Don Quixote, published by Miguel de Cervantes in 1605. Quixote and his squire, Sancho Panza, come across thirty or forty windmills on the plain. Quixote sees giants.

To him this is a calling. In John Ormsby's translation he tells Sancho, "this is righteous warfare, and it is God's good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth."

Sancho tells him plainly that they're windmills. Quixote charges anyway. The wind turns a sail, the lance shatters, and horse and rider go rolling across the plain.

The part people forget comes next. Quixote doesn't conclude he was wrong. He decides an enchanter turned the giants into windmills to rob him of the glory. The story survives the crash intact.

From the saddle, the windmill never looks like a windmill. It looks like the most important fight in the company.

Why the big swing feels like the right thing

Owners who tilt at windmills are rarely lazy and almost never cynical. They're usually the hardest-working person in the building, which is exactly why the pattern is hard to see.

The big swing has everything going for it emotionally. It's visible. It's bold. It sounds like leadership when you describe it to a banker, a peer group, or your spouse. It promises to solve several problems at once. And it belongs to the owner, so nobody else gets to say it's off.

The necessary work has none of that. Closing out jobs on time. Reviewing estimates before they go out. Billing change orders the week they're approved. Holding the weekly leadership meeting when there's nothing exciting to report. Walking away from the customer who pays slow and fights every invoice. Nobody throws a party for a clean WIP report.

So the owner feels noble chasing the giant and guilty sitting with the spreadsheet. That feeling is the illusion. The attractive thing has dressed itself up as the right thing, and the person best placed to see through it is the one most invested in the story.

What Collins and Hansen found

Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen spent nine years on the research behind Great by Choice, published in 2011. (It's often credited to Good to Great. It's a different book and a different study.) They started with 20,400 companies and cut the list to seven that beat their industry index by at least ten times through long stretches of turbulence. They called them 10X companies and paired each one with a company in the same industry, facing the same conditions, that fell short.

What they didn't find is the useful part. In a 2011 Fortune piece on the book, they wrote that the 10X leaders were "not more creative. They're not more visionary. They're not more charismatic. They're not more ambitious. They're not more blessed by luck. They're not more risk-seeking. They're not more heroic. And they're not more prone to making big, bold moves."

Then the line every owner with a pet project should read twice. The comparison companies "pursued much more aggressive growth and undertook big-leap, radical-change adventures to a much greater degree than the 10X winners."

The also-rans had the vision, the ambition, and the nerve. What they lacked was the discipline to find out whether the swing would land before they took it.

Fire bullets, then cannonballs

Collins and Hansen's image for this is a ship at sea. A hostile vessel is bearing down and you have a limited supply of gunpowder. Pour it all into one cannonball, miss by 40 degrees, and you're out of powder. Fire a bullet instead and it misses by 40 degrees. The next misses by 30, then by 10. The next one hits the hull. Now you put the rest of the powder into a cannonball along that same line of sight.

A bullet, in their terms, is low cost, low risk, and low distraction. A cannonball is a concentrated bet. Both groups in the study fired cannonballs. The difference was calibration, meaning empirical validation from actual experience before the big shot. As jimcollins.com sums up the finding, "Calibrated cannonballs correlate with outsized results; uncalibrated cannonballs correlate with disaster."

Their best-known example is Apple's iPod. By 2002 it was less than 3 percent of Apple's net sales, "a very cool bullet, but a bullet nonetheless." Apple kept stacking evidence, launched the music store, stacked more evidence, and only then fired the cannonball. Looking back, it reads like a single stroke of genius. It was a sequence of small, validated shots.

That's the move Quixote never made. He didn't ride closer. He didn't send Sancho to check. He put everything he had into one charge at the first mill.

The comparison companies had plenty of courage. What they skipped was the bullet.

What windmills look like in a trades company

These are patterns we see often, written as illustrations, not client stories.

The second location, opened because the first one finally feels stable, and staffed by pulling the best project manager out of the operation that pays for everything.

The new ERP or field software, bought to fix job costing nobody has defined. You can't automate a process you haven't named.

The new service line or market, chosen because a competitor is in it, before anyone has priced a single job.

The acquisition, pursued because buying growth feels faster than fixing margin at home.

The trophy bid, a job twice the size of anything the company has run, taken on the belief that the team will rise to it.

Any of these can be the right move. Each becomes a windmill when it gets the owner's full weight before a small test has come back, while the core business quietly leaks cash or people.

What the business actually requires

The same research has a name for the unglamorous side: the 20 Mile March. Picture walking from San Diego to Maine at 20 miles a day, every day. You don't stop in the desert heat, and you don't push to 40 on a good day. Collins and Hansen found that every 10X company held to a march like that. Southwest Airlines demanded a profit every year, and in 1996, with more than 100 cities asking for service, it opened four. At Stryker, CEO John Brown set 20 percent annual net income growth and called it "the law."

For a $10M to $100M contractor, manufacturer, or field service company, the march is usually a handful of plain markers. Gross margin by job against the bid. Change orders billed within a set number of days. Backlog measured against real crew capacity. Cash collected, not just invoiced. A leadership meeting that happens every week and actually solves something. We made a related case in A Scorecard Is Not a Dashboard: if a number can't put something on the issues list, it's theater.

None of that is exciting. All of it decides whether the company can survive the cannonball when it's finally time to fire one.

Discipline is what pays for the big swing. Skip the discipline and the business pays for it instead.

The Sancho problem

Quixote had one person telling him the truth, and he ignored him. Plenty of owners don't have even that.

In an owner-led company, the people closest to the work usually see the windmill first. The controller sees the cash. The operations lead sees the crews. The estimator sees the bids that don't pencil. But the project belongs to the owner, and pushing back on it can feel like pushing back on the person who signs the checks. So they go quiet, or they say it once and let it drop.

That silence is the expensive part. Nothing looks like it's failing. The core business keeps running because a few strong people are holding it together while the owner is out on the plain. They're compensating, and the cost stays invisible until one of them burns out or leaves.

The test

Run this with your calendar and your leadership team this week.

Quixote never asked whether they were giants. He only asked how to beat them. Before you spur the horse this quarter, ask the question Sancho kept asking: what's actually in front of us?

Common questions

Note on sources

The windmill episode and the "righteous warfare" line come from Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part One, Chapter VIII (1605), in John Ormsby's English translation. Fire bullets, then cannonballs, the ship-at-sea image, the definition of a bullet, the calibrated and uncalibrated cannonball line, and the iPod example come from Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen, Great by Choice (2011), as excerpted on jimcollins.com. The study design (a nine-year project begun in 2002, 20,400 companies, seven 10X cases, each beating its industry index by at least ten times), the list of traits 10X leaders did not have more of, the finding on comparison companies' big-leap adventures, the 20 Mile March, Southwest Airlines' 1996 city openings, and Stryker's 20 percent "law" come from Collins and Hansen, "How to Manage Through Chaos," Fortune, September 30, 2011, reproduced on jimcollins.com. The trades company windmills are illustrations written for this essay, not client examples. We borrow what works. We do not rent another firm's operating system and call it ours.

Norsten Collective works with founder-led companies to replace founder dependence with leadership systems, execution clarity, and scalable team performance.