A journey where you do not get speeding tickets

"Speed is of essence" is a much used (abused) phrase in corporate inter-personal communication. It is important for organisations - big and small to be able to deliver and deliver fast. Business leaders earlier used to have a simple strategy for creating successful ventures: 

• Step 1: Identify a business objective that impacts positively towards the organisation's vision
• Step 2: Develop (evolve and re-develop) processes to achieve the business objective
• Step 3: Align functional teams to run the processes to achieve the business objective

While all of the above still holds relevance, each step comes with a rider of "urgency". By urgency and speed, I do not imply mad-rush for customer acquisition at the cost of profitability / business fundamentals. But I am all for "hustle". From an era of information arbitrage the world has moved towards information available at the tap of a hand-held or at the call of "Siri". With all the information available to business leaders, it is imperative that they are able to build in 'urgency' and 'speed' within processes and within team members. For example:

• A human resources business manager / leader, when hiring, should be able to decide on a good fit fast rather than wait for the best fit. Large organisations have the redundancies in organisations structures which allow a position to be vacant for upto 5 to 6 months as well. Start-ups do not have the luxury of redundancies.
• A business development manager should be able to scope a region, generate business leads and get the first 5 customers on board and not wait to prepare a directory of probable customers. 
• A marketing manager should be able to ideate and implement new brand experience initiatives - Monthly if not weekly. As part of a large structured corporate, I worked on a branding project where we spent 4 months in developing packaging (design + development) for a really simple product. Contrast this with start-ups creating a new brand, the actual product and its go-to-market strategy and launching it via digital media in the same time-frame.
• A start-up CEO should be able to create the sense of purpose and sense of urgency within the team and maintain a 10,000 ft. view of the business (Maybe 1000 ft. is more relevant in start-up parlance). The driver of the vehicle (CEO) can not be running a sprint herself / himself.

While there are no right or wrong ways of leading businesses - there are just different "Visions". The start-up journey will not issue you speeding tickets. Ideating, executing, delivering faster will create more opportunities for mistake but the winners would be the ones who are able to identify and learn from mistakes and move doubly fast. Harvard Business Review and Forbes magazines have done research pieces on the relevance of "Speed" (Read here). 

The counter arguments that Sir Isaac Newton would not have discovered gravity if he was not leisurely looking at an apple tree - holds true. And therein lies the difference in the DNA of a scientist / artist and an entrepreneur / hustler.

Speed On !