Fast Company              

Fast Thinking

Road-mapping

Anticipating

Spotting Trends

Letting Best Ideas Win

Fast Decision-making

Setting Rules and Guiding Principles

Reassessing Constantly Past Decisions

Getting Rid of the Bureaucracy

Success Story: Charles Schwab

Fast to Market

Launching a Crusade

Owning Your Competitive Advantage

Institutionalizing Innovation

Rapid Experimentation

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

Innovation-friendly Organization

Competitive Strategies

• Product/Service Innovation

  • Survival Strategy: New attributes & Line extensions

  • Market Leadership Strategy: New product categories, New brands, and Speed... More

Steve Jobs' 12 Rules of Success

7. 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:

• anticipate

• spot trends

• create environment that does let the best idea - regardless of origin - win

• assess accurately and quickly the potential of new ideas.¹

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.

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... More

 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:

• Speed

• Simplicity

• Self-confidence... More

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

• Empowerment. Ideally, empowerment of employees results in increased initiative, involvement, enthusiasm, innovation and speed, all in support of the conpany's vision... More

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

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... More

References:

1. It's not the BIG and eats the SMALL... it's the FAST that eats the SLOW, Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton

2. "Relentless Growth", Christopher Meyer

3. "Radical Innovation", Harvard Business School

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

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, 2007 Number 4