Moving with speed – spotting and pursuing opportunities faster than your competitors in business.

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

"The value of time, that is of being a little ahead of your opponent, often provides greater advantage than superior numbers or greater resources." – Sun Tzu, "The Art of War"

Moving with speed – staying ahead of your competition

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". If you wish to stay ahead of your competition, you should learn how to move with speed and build four main fast-moving competencies: fast thinking, fast decision-making, getting to market faster, and sustaining speed.

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.

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.

Preparing minds – 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 time.

How to think faster than your competitors

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,
work on developing a sense of heightened perception.

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.

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Fast company: General Electric

"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," 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.

"If you're not fast you can't win... Speed is everything. It is the indispensable ingredient of competitiveness." Speed, simplicity and self-confidence are closely intertwined. By simplifying the organization and instilling confidence, you create the foundation for an organization that incorporates speed into the fabric of the company.

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.

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Fast company: Charles Schwab

Charles Schwab pioneered seamless stock trading on Internet in 1996. They went from a tiny firm to the world's largest financial services company. On their journey, first, they developed criteria – Charles Scwab's Guiding Principles – for making fast decisions. Second, they realized that they should own their competitive advantage to be able to bring financial products to the market faster than their competitors. They did so, and proved their ability to innovate faster that others. Finally, they managed to institutionalize innovation.

Acting with lightning speed, Charles Schwab introduced online trading service e.schwab to the market in May 1996 – within months of conception. The company signed up 25 customers within two weeks – their target for the full year. Being fast made paid off for Schwab. By the start of 2000, Schwab had an average 25% market share, was handling one of four stock trades in the United States, was receiving nearly 80 million hits on pick days, had open up more than 3 million online accounts, and was doing more than $10 billion weekly in e-commerce. On January 1, 2000. the market capitalization of Charles Schwab surpassed that of Merrill Lynch, and Schwab became the world's largest financial services company.

Actually, all the other brokerage companies could have done the same thing. Schwab's discount brokerage idea was open to Merrill Lynch, Smith Barney, and the rest who said, "It'll never amount to anything." As late as 1998, Merrill Lynch derided the Web as a passing fad and didn't think or decide fast enough.

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Lessons taught by fastest companies

The fastest companies that get with new products or services to market ahead of their competitors abandon often traditional visions and mission statements – they share something bigger and stronger. Each has a cause that they use to launch a crusade5. They also set, live, and enforce guiding principles enabling them to make fast decisions and get fast to market.