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, stuck to tested methods, didn’t foster employee collaboration, and weren’t overly concerned about alignment.

Strategically Fast Companies Vs. Strategically Slow Companies Strategically Fast CompaniesSenior leaders are closely aligned and committed to initiatives’ success.Team members sometimes switch responsibilities to make things easier for one another.Teams review how their work is going.Groups capture and communicate lessons learned.Success is based on the ability to explore new technologies.Employees create innovative products and services.Management systems work coherently to support overall objectives.Even experienced employees receive training when initiatives are launched.

Strategically Slow CompaniesInitiatives succeed despite the lack of unanimous senior-level support.People focus on their own responsibilities to ensure that the work gets done.People don’t take time to reflect.Groups move on to other assignments without debriefing on previous initiatives.Success is based on the ability to improve quality and lower costs.Employees fine-tune offerings to keep current customers satisfied.People often work at cross-purposes because management systems give them competing objectives.time is rarely made for training and education.

Ultimately, strategic speed is a function of leadership. Teams that become comfortable taking time to get things right, rather than plow ahead full bore, are more successful in meeting their business objectives. That kind of assurance must come from the top.

Link: https://hbr.org/2010/05/need-speed-slow-down#

Need Speed? Slow Down (Harvard Business Review)

In business, there’s a speed gap: It’s the difference between how important a firm’s leaders say speed is to their competitive strategy and how fast the company actually 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.

Paradoxically, they should try slowing down instead. In our study of 343 businesses (conducted with the Economist Intelligence Unit), the companies that embraced initiatives and chose to go, go, go to try to gain an edge ended up with lower sales and operating profits than those that paused at key moments to make sure they were on the right track. What’s more, the firms that “slowed down to speed up” improved their top and bottom lines, averaging 40% higher sales and 52% higher operating profits over a three-year period.

How did they defy the laws of business physics, taking more time than competitors yet performing better? They thought differently about what “slower” and “faster” 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. Simply increasing the pace of production, for example, may be one way to try 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 true value proposition.

Simply increasing the pace of production often leads to decreased value over time.

In our study, higher-performing companies with strategic speed made alignment a priority. They became more open to ideas and discussion. They encouraged innovative thinking.

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