STOP! And win.

I do a lot of work to accelerate business.  Its kinda my thing, and not for nothing.  I work in pharma, and accelerating R&D means lives saved (for a TRULY amazing story about a drug we accelerated to market by a full year, check out:  https://my.clevelandclinic.org/patient-stories/151-alive-and-thriving-thanks-to-cancer-research).  Accelerating other aspects of business is valuable in your business too, and for all kinds of reasons.

But the path to real acceleration is not always obvious.  In fact, it is often counterintuitive.  The Navy SEALs have a saying "Slow is accurate.  Accurate is fast.  Slow is fast."  I want to take that one step further.  Stopping is fast. 

One of the things we struggle with in large companies is complication and complexity.  Mistakes happen all of the time in complex organizations and complicated processes.  And we move right along because we "need to go fast."

Question time:  Are you ever going to run that process again?  Yes.  You will most definitely launch another product.  You will absolutely approve another supplier.  You will no doubt open a new office, change the plant layout, present to a regulatory agency, make an agreement.  So that mistake is an opportunity, if fixed, to accelerate the next run.

Question time 2:  If you launch five products a year, and fixed every problem that occurred in the first launch so that it never happened again, how much faster would your second launch be?  If you fixed every problem in every launch so none of them ever recurred in subsequent launches, how awesome would your launch machine be next year?  In 3 years?  In five years?

If we just stop, think, and fix permanently before moving forward, we will accelerate.  Imperceptibly at first, but within a short time, our competitors will not know what hit them.  And thousands more lives will be saved.  Billions more customers will be delighted. 

Now get out there and Stop.  It will make you faster than others can imagine.