Need for Speed in Today’s Businesses
In this age, it is simple difficult to overstate the significance of speed in business. It’s because the laid back attitude and bureaucracy are tale of the past and with the pace at which society progresses, companies have to do whatever it takes to stay relevant. Speed is often used as a differentiating factor in the business world, in large part because it is very easy to track. For example, when a company hires a web designer to give their website an overhaul, they’ll expect to get a rough timeline for how long the work will take.
As we all know that businesses due to the global recession are struggling to survive. Moving quickly is a natural instinct to them. Still, it’s difficult to overstate the importance of speed in business. With the pace at which society progresses, companies have to do whatever it takes to stay relevant.
Here are 5 reasons why speed matters in today’s business.
1. Speed-Driven Culture
A culture driven by speed doesn’t have to compromise on or sacrifice quality. In fact, a speed-driven culture can benefit just about every facet of the business — we, our teams, our business processes and so on and so forth. With anything in life, the faster things move, the quicker they improve. The quicker things improve, the more we’re going to learn about what it takes to run our business successfully.
Quite often, we learn by repetition. As we keep providing services to our clients, we’re naturally going to learn and improve our skills over time. We learn more from working on 15 projects than we do from working 10. If we can learn to work more efficiently so we can complete 15 projects in the time it used to take to do 10, just think how quickly we can accelerate our learning.
2. If You don’t speed up, you’ll be left behind
We must understand that with the speed at which businesses move, keeping up is a constant task that never gets any easier. Everyone out there is pushing harder than ever to quickly take the next step, which leaves you with little time to prove yourself. If you can’t keep up and move quickly, your competitors will. They won’t hesitate to leave you in the dust if you can’t think on your feet.
As Jeff Lerner, Owner and CEO of Xurli, says: “In a world where everything is moving so rapidly, simply being fast isn’t enough; you have to be faster than anyone and everyone. Accelerate until you’re at the front and move fast to stay there”. Think of Blockbuster — they remained the same for years while their competition, namely Netflix, found avenues to quickly move the entire industry forward.
3. Customers love Speed
We live in an age of near-instant gratification, where consumers are not-so-patiently awaiting the next big thing. Take phone releases for example — every year, like clockwork, we see a new iPhone, a new Galaxy, a new everything. People simply don’t like the status quo; they want something more and they want it now. Companies must work quickly to satiate their appetites because audiences will have no qualms about moving to another product or service.
As companies continue to meet these expectations, too, overall standards rise, making speed all the more necessary. As Luke Kanies, Founder and CEO of Puppet Labs, notes, “It doesn’t matter if you’re a media company, a retail company or a bank — you need to leverage IT to help innovate and evolve your company or it will die. It’s a simple choice, either you’re going to or your competitors will and they’ll crush you in the market”.
4. Faster Learning = Evolution
So far, we’ve covered the difficult side of maintaining speed as a company, but it’s a hugely beneficial practice that businesses ought to embrace. As companies learn to move quickly, they naturally evolve faster than ever to the point of near-exponential growth. As Savina Singh, CEO of JoJo Modern Pets states: “The speed with which an entrepreneur can move is determined by their ability to balance scalable infrastructure needs vs low overhead costs”.
As such, fulfilling expectations and standing out becomes surprisingly easy. Just like any other business trait, the more it’s practiced, the easier it becomes to maintain it, allowing companies to eventually move at a rapid pace with ease.
5. It Creates a Culture of Speed
Once you learn to move quickly and maintain speed, a culture of speed naturally forms, where standards for speed are just as high — if not higher — than those of consumers. The benefits are obvious, but they can’t be overstated.
With everyone and everything moving faster, innovation and efficiency go through the roof, blowing back your competition and blowing away your customers. No company in any industry can expect to get ahead with a slow culture; by design, entrepreneurship is all about moving forward and pushing innovation forward.
Wrap Up
That’s not just one of the many cheesy lines of dialogue you’ll find in the movie Top Gun. Whether consciously or unconsciously, it’s also something that we should be thinking as a business leader. Believe it or not, speed is now one of the most important factors in building a successful brand — and I’m not just talking about shipping e-commerce products as quickly as you’d expect to get a pizza delivery. A focus on speed, without sacrificing quality, will pay major dividends for our business.
No matter what industry you work in, there’s always the opportunity to do things faster. While we must be careful to ensure that speed doesn’t cause us to sacrifice quality, learning how to run our business at a faster pace will pay big dividends in the long run. Increasing our speed helps us be more productive, while also increasing client satisfaction.
About the Author
Muhammad Sajwani is the Founder and Managing Director of Evolve HR which aims at transforming, enriching and evolving Human Capital of Pakistan, Evolve HR thrives in challenging assumptions that hinder organisational aspirations, by creating innovative solutions that yield maximum impact, scalability & benefit to a wider base of stakeholders. As a Business Coach and Organisational Consultant, Sajwani knows how to combine business insights with people insights to transform organisations and put them on the path to growth.
