Merely increasing the pace of production or service often leads to decreased value over time.
There’s a speed gap in business: It’s the difference between how important a firm’s leaders say speed is to their competitive strategy and how fast the company moves. That gap is significant regardless of region, industry, company size, or strategic emphasis. Organizations fearful of losing their competitive advantage spend much time and many resources looking for ways to pick up the pace. It is even more visible in crisis time. To face the current time challenge, leaders work harder and faster.
But is this always the case?
The is a significant difference between what the “slower” and “faster” strategies mean. Firms sometimes confuse operational speed (moving quickly) with strategic speed (reducing the time it takes to deliver value)—and the two concepts are quite different. Merely increasing the pace of production, for example, maybe one way to close the speed gap. But that often leads to decreased value over time, in the form of lower-quality products and services. Likewise, new initiatives that move fast may not deliver any value if time isn’t taken to identify and adjust the right value proposition.
Higher-performing companies with a strategic speed made alignment a priority. They became more open to ideas and discussion. They encouraged innovative thinking. And they allowed time to reflect and learn. By contrast, performance suffered at firms that moved fast all the time, focused too much on maximizing efficiency, stick to tested methods, didn’t foster employee collaboration and weren’t overly concerned about alignment.
