Harnessing the Power of Speed

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To get ahead in an accelerating world, you have to use speed to your advantage. At a superficial level, find ways to get all your routine tasks done faster. But if you really want to get ahead, embrace speed and put it work doing new things that people aren’t even anticipating. If you can consistently find new and enticing ways to use speed to your own benefit, you’re very well positioned to soar.

In the sport of boxing, emphasis is placed on blocking or avoiding attacks by attacking your opponent first. This sport uses brute force to meet and hopefully repel attacks. The Age of Speed is already here, and one way to respond would be to try and use our brute force to resist it. We may even hope society’s thirst for speed will peter out and lose steam all by itself.

In aikido, by contrast, the idea is to use your opponent’s strength to your own advantage. Instead of trying to use brute force to stop them, you guide them to head off in a better direction with more power than you could have produced alone. In the Age of Speed, this means becoming an advocate for speed an embracing it fully rather than wearing yourself out fruitlessly trying to resist it.

It’s time to take matters into your own hands and leverage speed. So how do you do that?

Start by anticipating that in every field, you’re going to need to compete on speed in the future. Start building the systems, the processes and the infrastructure now that will enable you to leverage speed in the future.

Seek more speed not just in the obvious areas but also in unexpected ways. Try to generate truly remarkable results by reaching for speed. For example, one restaurant has been highly successful by replacing the traditional appetizer-entree-main-dessert restaurant experience model with one in which diners get a series of small plates continually whisked in and out by servers. Not only does this keep the diners interested and engaged, but it also creates a dynamic atmosphere for the restaurant because things are happening all the time. The same kind of phenomena is going to happen in other industries as people integrate speed into their business models. Think about how you can do new and interesting things with speed in your own field.

Aggressively look for speed. Streamline everything you can. Use technology to automate as much as feasible. Find shortcuts that will enable people to spend less tiem ordering and more time using what you offer. Make speed your most trusted ally.

Feel empowered when you think about more speed rather than threatened. Concentrate on having a healthy appreciation for the benefits of speed in all areas of your business and life.

Think deeply about the four profiles of speed. Admittedly, the idea of being a Balloon sounds appealing but even it it was feasible, you’d probably get bored by it after a while. Being a Zeppelin or a Bottle Rocket have some obvious problems. The only sane option is to work hard at becoming a Jet. That requires that you appreciate speed and get with it. It also means that you become agile, aligned and aerodynamic. Start working on it today.

Learning How to Go Fast Like a Jet Without Exploding

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Everyone needs to learn how to go fast in ways that will work to our advantage. They key to doing this is to be more and more like jets:
Agile: able to sense opportunities and respond.
Aerodynamic: configured to go as fast as possible.
Aligned: working towards a single unifying aim.

If you can learn how to inject these traits into your organization, you position yourself to reap the benefits of using speed to your advantage. You can then thrive in the years ahead as speed becomes an even greater factor in business and personal success.

If you’re genuinely going to be agile as an organization and as an individual, you need to capacity to do three things:

You need to be able to sense new opportunities because in the era of globalization, threats and opportunities arise faster than ever before. Not only can new competitors arise from nowhere, but this also means new opportunities will come into view at almost every turn as well. To speed up, you have to open your mind to the world around you. Proctor & Gamble has an internal Website where employees can collaborate together to come up with the new product ideas. This has led to stretchable plastic garbage bags and new types of erasers getting to market. P&G also works with outside techonology developers now rather than insisting everything has to be developed in-house.

You have to be flexible in your thoughts and actions which essentially means hitting a good balance between humility and courage. A flexible organization accepts its own weaknesses but still takes risks. Any time you try something new, it’s likely you’ll fail at first, but if you’re not willing to risk that, you’ll forego lots and lots of opportunities. Humility simply means you and your organization acknowledge that what you’re doing may not turn out to be the best way to go. To be flexible, you must be willing to take risks at the same time as you have courage to fail.

You need to be responsive to changes in the economy, in your industry, in your organization and the list goes on and on. To be responsive requires that you’re ultrasensitive to background changes, you have the ability to analyze them and then you take the appropriate action sooner rather than later. A good example of this is Pepsi, the world’s number two beverage maker. Realizing more customers are becoming health conscious, the company is moving away from its carbonated beverages with a passion. In 2007 alone, Pepsi introduced sixteen new energy drinks, juices and vitamin-enhanced waters that are more attuned to those evolving consumer preferences. This is what it means to meet the agility imperative with corporate responsiveness.

Aerodymamic:
Eliminate multitasking
Limit interruptions
Do things quickly

In business, to be aerodynamic means you don’t have any drag that slows your organization down and adds chaos. It’s surprising how many people and organizations struggle to eliminate drag when this would seem like an obvious way foward in the Age of Speed. To reduce drag:

You need to avoid multitasking like the plague which is ironic since most people try and multitask to speed up. The problem is that rather than helping us speed up, multitasking usually just ends up adding clutter and chaos. You end up splitting your brainpower and diluting your focus. Multitasking actually increases the time it would take to complete tasks one at a time sequentially. Admittedly, multitasking low value and repetitive activities may be fine, but if you’re working on something that is genuinely high value for you or your organization, it deserves your full and undivided attention. Focus on identifying the right things to do, and then complete each task before moving on and you’ll be pleasantly surprised how streamlined everything becomes.

You have to limit the interruptions that sap your productivity whether these interruptions are other people or gadgets. Whenever you’re interrupted, it takes you minutes or even hours to get back into what you need to do. That lost time isn’t cheap. As a suggestion, why don’t you set aside a designated period each day where you will focus on your most important project without any phone calls, email or even chatting with coworkers. If this is instituted organization-wide and everyone knows not to disturb others during that period, you’ll get lots done. This is what IBM does now, where time is reserved every Friday for employees to focus on work project they would otherwise have felt compelled to complete outside their regular work hours. Dow Corning simlarly sets aside one week every quarter that is meeting free so employees can focus on getting stuff done. Limiting interruptions also means you limit the amount of unnecessary information that comes across your desk. Set up filters that will keep trivia but still let the key information and facts gets through.

You have to focus on getting through key tasks quickly so you can then move on to other activies that will add value. One way to get more done is to establish a broader range of trusted destinations. Trusted destinations are something or someone you can trust to give you what you need without supervision. This may be as simple as forwarding an email on to someone else and having them take care of it for you or as complex as hiring a personal assistant. If you carefully examine everything you routinely do and question whether there really isn’t someone else available who can do this for you better than ou could do it yourself, you may be pleasantly surprised to find there are all kinds of trusted destinations there that you’ve never really noticed before. If you’re trying to do everything yourself, you become the bottleneck and your organization becomes less aerodynamic. To eliminate drag and get the most out of your personal energy, put some good filters in place, learn how to delegate effectively and free yourself from the mental clutter.

Aligned:
Be authentic
Know how you fit in
Keep it simple

In simple terms, to be aligned as an organization or as an individual means that you have a single unifying purpose that gives direction and poise. When you’re aligned to one consistent long-term aim rather than bouncing from one idea to the next, you’ll get places. Alignment comes as you do three things:

You pursue aims that are authentic for you. You have to be focused on some aim that is completely aligned with your values and your deepest strengths. As strange as it may sound, it’s usually easier for you to identify a goal that is not authentic than it is to recognize when you’re pursuing the right aim. When you feel passionate about something, it’s easy to make progress in leaps and bounds. An authentic purpose for your organization is not just something that would be nice to have — it’s the one thing that gives you an emotional buzz. When you’ve identified your authentic purpose and all of your actions align with that goal, you’ll have genuine staying power. Speed then becomes easy to achieve and sustain, because everything you dol will be aligned with that purpose and you’ll be free of any self-doubts or cross-purpose initiatives.

You know why you exist and how you fit into your world and therefore you pursue only the projects that matter to you and make the most of your talents. You stay on track and keep your powder dry by avoiding the temptation to try and be all things to all people.

You keep everything simple because on balance, the simplest solutions always turn out to be the best. The more distractions and side roads you can eliminate, the faster and further you can go in the right direction. From a business perspective, the more projects that go off in tangential directions you pass on, the better you can focus your energy and resources on what matters most. Simplicity is the key to sustainable speed for any organization. In some ways, this will appear counterintuitive at fist. Many outsiders assume that successful organizations have complex processes at work. However, in reality organizations get to be fast in the first place because they simplify what needs to get done and set up an environment of simplicity for everyone and everything involved. This is a kind of positive feedback loop. We need simplicity to achieve speed in the first place, but speed itself leads to greater simplicity in the future as we work to maintain our speed.

The Four Different Profiles of Speed

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In the Age of Speed, there are four behavior patterns that characterize whether speed is embraced or resisted, and whether it works for us or against us. It’s well worth becoming familiar with these four patterns and watching our for them in the people you meet and in your own life. If you can recognize the specific pattern involved, you’ll have a head start on knowing what to do.

The four generalized behavior patterns that have emerged in the Age of Speed are:

Zeppelins (Resist speed, Fail)
Balloons (Resist speed, Succeed)
Bottle Rockets (Embrace speed, Fail)
Jets (Embrace speed, Succeed)

Let’s take a look at each of these patterns in turn.

1. Zeppelins

Zeppelins resist speed. They move forward at a snail’s pace and therefore have a very tough time adapting when the general busines senvironment is in a state of flux. They may even be able to see the need for more speed clearly, but tehy can’t do anything about it.

You’ll know you’re working in a Zeppelin organization when:
Seven levels of approval are needed for simple requests.
Outdated modes of communication are in use.
Endless meetings are held, but nothing ever changes.
Everyone drones on about being stressed all the time.

Zeppelins are lumbering, and it is this that makes them dangerous. The most famous Zeppelin in history was the Hindenburg, which exploded and crashed in 1937 killing thirty-six people.

In the corporate world, Zeppelins are the organizations that cling to their core technologies even in the face of impressive new technologies. Eastman Kodak is a good role model for Zeppelins. Although Kodak actually invented the digital camera in 1994, it wasn’t until the year 2000 that the company threw its weight behind this new technology. Instead of being at the forefront of an emerging new industry, Kodak’s entry into the digital imaging arena was viewed by consumers as a reactionary move. Rather than being able to take advantage of a first-move advantage, Kodak was forced to keep cutting its prices. No amount of aggressive marketing was able to convince customers they should wait to get film developed rather than see their images immediately. Kodak’s reluctance to embrace speed has been very costly for its shareholders. The company posted continual losses from the third quarter of 2004 until the same quarter two years later. In one of those quarters alone, Kodak managed to lose $37 million.

2. Balloons

Balloons are very rare in the corpoarte world. These are successful organizations that don’t seek speed and that really do not need to. If you’re in a business that makes hand-crafted collector’s items or in a highly specialized field like perfume testing, speed really matters little.

Balloons simply cannot exist in most industries. These companies generally inhabit niche markets and have highly valued specialized know-how. These companies aren’t trying to become huge, and therefore the potential benefits of speed are lost on them. They’re hapoy to limit their opportunities and stick with the status quo.

3. Bottle Rockets

Bottle Rockets not only embrace speed, they pursue it at all costs. They do things at a breakneck pace and warmly embrace any new technology that looks promising. Unfortunately, Bottle Rockets typically fail to put the right systems and infrastructure in place and therefore they either head off in all directions on the spur of a moment or fail to do whatever is needed to be a long-term success.

Bottle Rockets are destructive because they focus so much on going fast that they never step back and ask why. And just like their namesakes, most Bottle Rocket organizations eventually blow up or fizzle out. Dell is a good example. The company pioneered direct-to-consumer computer sales and rode these efficiencies to the top of its market. Then it failed to change when consumer preferences evolved rapidly. Today, Dell is actively trying to catch up with its competitors, who were must faster to change.

4. Jets

Jets get it right in the Age of Speed. They have the agility to swerve around obstacles without losing sight of long-term objectives. They are aligned with clear goals that play to their strengths and core competencies. And they’re aerodynamic–they’re free from the bureaucratic drag that typically slows down their competitors. In all, jets harness the power of speed and use it to advantage.

Jets move fast. They use speed as an ally. They let speed work for them and not against them. Probably the poster child of a Jet-style organization of the modern era is Google. This company is agile, aerodynamic and aligned:

Agile: it’s prepared to drop what isn’t working fast and swtich directions. When Google launched Google Video, it saw that YouTube was faster and better. Instead of trying to compete, Google bought YouTube.

Aerodynamic: Google streamlined its hiring process by integrating better and more accurate predictors of successful new hires into the process itself. The company now manages to attract a steady stream of qualified people.

Aligned: Google has a clear goal to become “the vortex of all modern advertising”. Everything the company does aligns with that single aim of being able to provide a complete sales and marketing platform. Many companies now look at Google as the first place they consider using for advertising.

Jets make maximum effective use of speed. They succeed and excel because they know how to harness speed and make it work for them.

The Blurring of the Lines between Personal and Professional

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One of the most common side-effects of the Age of Speed is that there is now widespread blurring of the boundaries between work and home. Simply put, technology is making it easier than ever for people to stay connected with their work while at home or having fun. This is a big part of the reason we have a love-hate relationship about speed and what it provides us.

With the advances in communication technologies, work has become much more of state of mind rather than a physical location we go to. As a direct result of this change, we never really feel like our work is done and we can relax doing other fun things. There’s always a nagging suspicion in the back of our minds that we should be doing something productive rather than something relaxing.

Part of this problem can be traced to the framework we use to organize our time. Historically, a pie chart could be used to describe this.

Using the different technologies we have available to us now, it isn’t at all unusual for those traditional boundaries to be much harder to differentiate. Thus, in the modern era, we’re more likely to have a time chart that is all jumbled up and changing from one week to the next.

The neat divisions and clean borders that once upon a time gave us a feeling of organization have in effect been rendered obsolete in the Age of Speed. Our use of time is much more fluid and variable. Instead of a pie with discrete segments, what most people have today is a large pie that is filled with a constantly changing mix of home, work and leisure activities. Whereas once we felt organized and structured, today there are many more judgment calls to make, priorities to juggle and pressures. Instead of being able to do work activities only while we are physically at our place of business, it is now possible to fit in a bit of work while at home or even in a completely different setting like at a ball game. What’s needed is a more up-to-date way to organize our time than the tried and true pie chart approach, no matter how much we may love it.

Instead of looking for better ways to keep work out of our personal time, we really should be endeavoring to put more personal time and passion into our work. If we place our personal values at the center and make them the cornerstone on which we allocate our time, a very different kind of chart is feasible.

The advantage of moving away from a pie chart based on where we are physically to one that is more values-driven is that we’re shifting from a choked-up perspective to an open perspective where we make rational choices. Time then becomes the tool we use to accomplish our dreams and goals. It is a valuable resource rather than a limiting constraint. It’s the difference between thinking of work as a “place to go” and instead of viewing work as “something you do that is meaningful.”

Other advantages of this new model would include:

The values-based time model encourages you to be aware of your values and connect what you do each day with them.

The new model will help you realize that the reason why you want to speed up is so you can spend more time doing what you love and not merely trying to get trivial things done faster.

The values-based model reflects your personal preferences. It will be different for everyone because we all place different priorities on different aspects of our lives.

Due to the fact that the new model focuses on the value of each task rather than on the task itself, it becomes much easier to manage your priorities in a cohesive way. You can better align exactly how you use your time with what you value. Furthermore, continual adjustments can be made as new and better information comes to hand.

The new model forces us to consider what we value and whether our use of time aligns with those values. This not only broadens our perspective, but also offers opportunities for less stress and greater direction in our actions.

Overall, it’s reasonable to suggest that a values-based framework for how we use our time will help us use speed tothat advantage. Instead of seeing speed as just another metric we should be trying to improve for its own sake, we will come to view speed as a tool we can use to achieve more of what matters and therefore should be warmly embraced and sought after.

Our Evolving Perspective on Speed

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People have been preconditioned to automatically correlate greater sped with more stress. Sayings like “Haste makes waste” and the tortoise and the hare fable have been deeply ingrained into culture. The problem is that if we reject trying to achieve greater speed out of hand automatically, we’re never going to get into a position where we can take full advantage of it. To view speed as a positive rather than a negative, try to identify the root cause of your knee-jerk resistance.

The love-hate relationship many people have about speed is generally based on outdated perspectives and the irrational fears of our conscious and subconsious minds. Consider a few facts about speed:

When pressed, most people will tell you the hare lost the race in Aesop’s fable because he was fast and irresponsible. This is incorrect. The hare’s speed didn’t work against him. It was the hare’s bad — even ridiculous — choice about how to spend his time that proved to be the problem. It’s incorrect to conclude slow is smart and fast is automatically irresponsible.

Most people believe it’s somehow “noble” to wait for our rewards rather than demand them immediately. Thus, many people delay things on principle alone and consider anyone who wants their rewards immediately as giving in to a “childish” impulse.

For every pop-culture saying like “Haste makes waste” or “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” there also seems to be another aphorism that says the opposite: “A stitch in time saves nine” or “He who hesitates is lost.”

The cumulative result of these factors is that people feel genuinely confused about speed. Most people love being the recipients of speedy service, but resist the pressure to do more themselves. We feel like if we’re going to do things faster, people will get used to that and they will demand that we perform at that higher speed every time they deal with us. This causes some tension because most people would say: “I just can’t go any faster. I’m already too busy and doing too much. I need to slow down, not speed up.”

It’s a counterintuitive notion that going faster doesn’t necessarily mean working harder. Almost all of us now have tools that allow us to accomplish more in less time than our counterparts could have even dreamed of achieving twenty years ago. That logically means that we have more time than they did. We don’t have to work the same number of hours they did to get things done, but the simple truth is that many of us don’t use the extra time we have to enjoy some rewarding experiences. Instead, we often end up squandering our free time on insignificant activities or things that just pop up without any conscious effort on our parts.

To derive the full benefits of speed, we need to make a distinction between our personal concepts of “fast” and “busy”. If we can harness speed to get the drudgery in our lives completed as quickly as possible so we can then move on to discretionary experience we will enjoy, then we’re more likely to see speed as an ally and not as amore of a “slave driver”. If we have a clear purpose to what we’re doing, we’re also more likely to see speed as a useful tool. If we’re trying to order our lives so that we can do more of what we like and less of what we don’t liek and not just more of everything, then speed makes a lot of sense.

They key to getting to love and utilize speed to maximum effect is to differentiate between repetitive chores and passionate pursuits.

Speed applied to getting repetitive chores done as quickly as possible is great. In this setting, we should pursue speed with zeal. If, however, the activity is something we love and are passionate about, we don’t want to speed through it. On the contrary, we want to enjoy the anticipation and then the experience of doing pleasant things.

So how do humans choose which activities we classify as being repetitive chores and which we classify under the passionate pursuits heading? This historically has come down to our own personal balance between time, cost and quality: If you wanted more of one, you generally had to be prepared to sacrifice some of the others.

Under this conventional model, different people assign different personal priorities to time, quality and cost. For example, someone on a tight budget doesn’t expect to get premium quality goods. If we need superior quality, we naturally expect it to cost more. And if we need something fast, we realize it’s either going to cost more or be of lesser quality than if we allow the processes involved to run their course.

In the Age of Speed, however, the traditional trade-offs between time, quality and cost have ceased to exist. Technology today provides more shortcuts to get things done than could ever have been visualized twenty years ago. Yet even in spite of this, most people still believe more speed generates more stress. Perhaps this is a carryover from the major changes that have happened in society over the past twenty years, or it may be that people have a natural emotional resistance to change that is influencing their thinking. The fact still remains that it’s probably time for us to embrace speed fully and find ways to create more of it rather than fight it.

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