Vadim Kotelnikov    

Fast Company

Move with Speed – Spot and Pursue Opportunities Faster than Your Competition

 

  

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

 

 

Fast Company 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 Fast Company Business Process Management System (BPMS) Frequently Switching Responsibilities

8 Best Practices of Successful Companies

  • Introduce new products faster that the competition... More

 

10 Commandments of Innovation

Effective Innovation Process

7 Lessons from Silicon Valley Firms

  1. Produce top quality at lightning speed.

Fast Company: thinking, quick decision-making, first to market

 

 

Moving with Speed: the Four Components1

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

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

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.

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.

10 Rules for Building a Great Business

Creating Competitive Disruption

7 Strategies

  • Develop the ability to surprise

  • Develop ability to move quickly.

The GE Leadership Effectiveness Survey (LES)

Business BLISS

Balance – Leadership – Innovation – Synergy – Speed

  • Live Speed: Think fast, make fast decisions, get to the market faster than your competition... More

 

 

Pearls of Wisdom

East

It is better to do it well than to do it quickly.

Sri Aurobindo

It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.

Confucius

There is more to life than just increasing its speed.

Mahatma Gandhi

West

A race horse that can run a mile a few seconds faster is worth twice as much. That little extra proves to be the greatest value.

  John D. Hess

The operative assumption today is that someone, somewhere, has a better idea; and the operative compulsion is to find out who has that better idea, learn it and put into action fast.

  Jack Welch

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.

Aneurin Bevan

Google's 10 Guiding Principles

  1. Fast is better than slow... More

 

Achieving and Maintaining Speed – 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

Competitive Strategies

Steve Jobs' 12 Rules of Success

  1. Strive to become a market leader. Own and control the primary technology in everything you do. If there's a better technology available, use it no matter if anyone else is not using it. Be the first, and make it an industry standard.... 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:

Preparing Minds

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.

Entrepreneurial Mindset

In an entrepreneurial organization, 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

4 Entrepreneurial Strategies

By: Peter Drucker

  • Being "the Fastest and the Mostest" the "greatest gamble", aiming from the beginning at permanent leadership.

 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.

Transform Your Business into an Innovative and Creative Culture

18 Leadership Lessons from Colin Powell

  • Once the information is in the 40 to 70 range, go with your gut. Don't wait until you have enough facts to be 100% sure, because by then it is almost always too late.... More

The Art of War: Planning an Attack

By: Sun Tzu

  • You must move as quickly as the wind.

  • The value of time, that is of being a little ahead of your opponent, often provides greater advantage than superior numbers or greater resources

  • Though I have heard of successful military operations that were clumsy but swift, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.

Own Your Competitive Advantage

Focus on your core competencies and outsource the rest. Make sure that you don't outsource your competitive advantage, however. You will never lead in innovation or be faster to market than your competition if you depend on other for your core technology.

Owning your competitive advantage will allow you to build it continuously, be more flexible, and eliminate speed breakers.

The Art of Innovation: 9 Truths

By: Guy Kawasaki

  • Don't worry, be crappy. An innovator doesn't worry about shipping an innovative product with elements of crappiness if it's truly innovative. The first permutation of a innovation is seldom perfect – Macintosh, for example, didn't have software (thanks to me), a hard disk (it wouldn't matter with no software anyway), slots, and color. If a company waits – for example, the engineers convince management to add more features – until everything is perfect, it will never ship, and the market will pass it by.

Inspirational Business Plan: Successful Innovation

Competition: "The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow." Rupert Murdoch.

Jack Welch advice business quotes

Speed is everything. It is the indispensable ingredient of competitiveness. If you're not fast you can't win.

Jack Welch

GE

 

One minute can decide the outcome of the battle,
one hour – the outcome of the campaign,
and one day – the fate of the country.

Alexander Suvorov

 

Jack Welch advice business quotes

The 3Ss of winning in business are Speed, Simplicity and Self-confidence. Just as surely as speed flows from simplicity, simplicity is grounded in self-confidence.

Jack Welch

GE

 

 

 

References:

  1. It's not the BIG and eats the SMALL... it's the FAST that eats the SLOW, J. Jennings & L. Haughton

  2. Relentless Growth, Christopher Meyer

  3. Radical Innovation, Harvard Business School

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

  5. Jack Welch and the GE Way, Robert Slater

  6. Jack Welch, interview, July 22, 1997

  7. "Venture Catalyst", Donald L. Laurie

  8. "Strategy's strategist: An interview with Richard Rumelt," McKinsey Quarterly