To Get Competitive, Forget Perfection. Fail Fast and Forward

Here’s how to increase speed and agility at your organization

Scale has always been an advantage in business. In a traditional marketplace, the more you have of something the better.

In my business of media planning and buying, this had been true for decades. When I was an executive at Starcom Mediavest Group, our organization was one of the largest global media agencies in the world. In 2016, according to RECMA, we purchased $54 billion of media on behalf of our clients and were #1 in the United States, China, the Middle East and many markets around the world.

But media was changing fast and dramatically. The historical advantages were being disrupted.

New companies like Google and Facebook radically changed the game. Their scale was driven by technology and new global platforms that simply worked faster and in real time to plan or buy ad space anywhere in the world with or without a sales rep, in or out of a home country. Even more importantly, planning and buying worked on detailed & specific audience definitions, key words and auction-based marketplaces, not traditional two-way scale negotiation on demographics and CPM’s. This was groundbreaking. Suddenly traditional buying scale was replaced by algorithms, audiences, platforms, content versions, and frictionless access.

To keep pace with the likes of Google and Facebook, we had to build new capability, hire and develop a whole new breed of talent versed and skilled in search, social, programmatic and real-time storytelling.  As CEO, I knew that we didn’t have time to lose. We had to get out front, try ideas and learn from them as quickly as possible.

Two decisions we made early on were implemented to create a new vision for the kind of company we wanted to be. The first decision was to transform ourselves from a traditional media agency business to a digitally-driven business by moving our business model from analogue to a business model based on digital, content and data analytics. 

The second decision was to simultaneously retrain and reskill our existing 8,000-employee base to “cross athletes,” as well as hire new skill sets in data science, analytics, content creation and digital strategy.  We wanted our existing teams to learn new skills and capabilities, and we invested heavily in training and development to achieve these goals. We wanted our new hires to become evangelists for the company to follow and emulate.

When faced with immense competition, a lot of organizations slow to a grinding halt trying to find the perfect solution. By doing so, they miss the golden opportunity. This is because the competition has moved faster, consumer trends have moved on and the market opportunity has closed.

The best organizations fail fast and fail forward. Failing doesn’t shake their confidence. They learn from it by quickly applying their lessons and going back to market with a new solution. Very often, that second time hits the mark.

So, what can you do to increase speed and agility at your organization? Here are four tactics to consider.

1.    Create a culture of learning and speed. This means emphasizing that there is no such thing as failing. You only fail forward, revise and reiterate. You establish a culture that’s fast so every team knows it’s okay to take a big swing and possibly miss. They need to be thinking, “I may not get it right in the first place—we’re learning in the market and will apply these learnings.”

2.    Build failure into everyone’s learning plan for the year. When reviewing performance, don’t just focus on successes. Also ask for examples of where the employee failed, what he or she learned from it, and how it led to future success. This is a great interview question but it tends to be lost on the job. Change that.

3.    Create skunkworks teams. If you want to quickly learn about a challenge, the best way is to create skunkworks teams that are cross-functional and come from diverse areas of the organization. Give them a big challenge and then put time constraints on them. For example, a team might have to came back in two weeks with the work of one month.

Also, be sure to incentivize the team for innovativeness around the idea, as well as how quickly they can deploy it. Remember, the clock is measuring how quickly you can get it into market and how quickly you can iterate the findings from consumers.

4.    Take the friction out. Specifically, figure out what tools and resources your teams need to move faster. For example, does your company offer collaboration tools like Slack that really allow people to work virtually in teams 24/7?  

Is there an open-source approach to how your company picks tools and systems? Is your expense reporting still paper-based or does your company allow employees to use a mobile app? Can you access systems, teleconference, WebEx and other collaboration platforms with one click?

These were the kinds of requests I would hear a lot from people when I was CEO. So, we focused on technology to free up the time and energy of our people to create and collaborate.

Surely there are more tactics that can increase speed across your organization. What are your own suggestions? Share them in the comments to get the conversation going, and I may include them in a future essay.