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Moving with Speed

by Vadim Kotelnikov & Ten3 East-West

"It's not the big that eat the small... it's the fast that eat the slow" - Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton, 2000

 

Fast Thinking

Road-mapping

Mastering Your Anticipating Skills

Mastering Your Ability to Spot Trends

Letting Best Ideas Win

Fast Decision-making

Setting Rules and Guiding Principles

Reassessing Constantly Past Decisions

Getting Rid of the Bureaucracy

Fast to Market

Launching a Crusade

Owning Your Competitive Advantage

Institutionalizing Innovation

 

Opportunity-driven Business Development Moving with Speed Fast Thinking Fast Decision Making Fast to Market Sustaining Speed Anticipating Spotting Trends Brainstorming Letting the Best Idea Win Setting Rules and Guiding Principles Getting Rid of Bureaucracy Constantly Reassessing Past Decisions Launching a Crusade Owning Competitive Advantage Institutionalizing Innovation: Innovation System Simplicity Growth Attitude Managing Creativity Roadmapping Staying Close to the Customer: Customer Partnership Boundarylessness Self-confidence

Moving with Speed: the Four Components1

  1. Fast thinking - anticipating the future, spotting trends before others, challenging assumptions, and creating a corporate environment where the best idea - regardless of origin - wins.

  2. Fast decision-making - establishing corporate guiding principles, blowing off stifling bureaucratic structures, shuffling portfolios, constantly reassessing everything, and matching the decision to the consequence.

  3. Fast to market - getting to the market faster through removing in-built speed-breakers, abandoning traditional visions and missions and launching a crusade instead, owning and exploiting your competitive advantage, getting vendors and suppliers operating on your timetable, staying beneath the radar, and building virtuous circles of speed.

  4. Sustaining speed - maintaining velocity through working on your business, injecting the relentless growth attitude into the firm, being ruthless with resources, building a scoreboard that measures activity, staying financially flexible, proving the math, institutionalizing innovation, and staying close to the customer.

Achieving Speed and Maintaining Velocity - the Key to Success

In the new economy where everything is moving faster and it's only going to get faster, the new mantra is, "Do it more with less and do it faster".1 In order to get real speed decisions at virtually every level must be made in minutes, not days or weeks. Decisions also have to be made "face-to-face, not memo-to-memo. This means that people have to think on their feet, and that the forests of meaningless paper trails and approvals - so common in large organizations - must be eliminated."5

Entrepreneurial Mindset

Venture values are different from established corporate shared values. "Entrepreneurial independence demands space for action and trust, while independence in a corporation implies responsibility and control imposed from above. Entrepreneurial speed demands agility, experimentation, adaptation, and rapid response in order to be first to market. Corporate experimentation comprises analysis, review, sober consideration of facts, and willingness sacrifice speed for thoroughness. Entrepreneurial paranoia - competitors are catching up to us - is overshadowed by an essential need to build corporate consensus and minimize perceived risk."7...More

Preparing Minds - the New Task of Strategic Planning

To meet the new challenges, this process should be redesigned to support real-time strategy making and to encourage 'creative accidents'. A successful strategy-planning process would help your company to react quicker to emerging opportunities and make faster decisions than your competitors do. It would ensure that your executives have a strong grasp of the strategic context they operate in before the unpredictable but inevitable twists and turns of your business push them to make critical decisions in real time4...More

How To Think Faster Than Your Competition

To be able to think fast, you need to "understand the primary drivers of change, work at staying plugged in, constantly search for new combinations, and work on developing a sense of heightened perception1". The fastest companies in the world think fast because of their ability to:

Case in Point: General Electric (GE)

"My job today is ten times faster than it was five years ago. A hundred times. The pace is enormously quicker because of technology. So everyone has to gearing themselves to a faster pace, to more competitiveness, to more intellectual capital. That's the game,"6 said Jack Welch, the legendary former CEO of GE, in 1997. Welch summed up his prescription for winning in three words:

In his 1993 Letter to Share Owners, the CEO talked more about speed and boudarylessness than any other topic. He gave some examples of GE's speed:

  • There was a new product announcement at GE Appliances every ninety days -  unthinkable years ago.

  • The GE90, the world's most powerful commercial jet engine, was designed and build in half the normal time.

  • Another team developed a breakthrough ultrasound innovation in less than a year and a half. Others designed and built a new AC locomotive in eighteen months...More

Bibliography:

  1. "It's Not the Big that Eat the Small... It's the Fast that Eat the Slow", Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton, 2000

  2. "Relentless Growth", Christopher Meyer, 1998

  3. "Radical Innovation", Harvard Business School, 2000

  4. "Tired of Strategic Planning?", The Times of India, 07.11.2002

  5. "Jack Welch and the GE Way", Robert Slater, 1999

  6. Jack Welch, interview, July 22, 1997

  7. "Venture Catalyst", Donald L. Laurie, 2001

Founder - Vadim Kotelnikov. © Copyright by Ten3 East-West.  | Copyright | Glossary | Links | Site Map |

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