The High-Speed Company: Creating Urgency and Growth in a Nanosecond Culture
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 1591847362
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The only way to ensure your company’s success is to change faster on the inside than the world is changing on the outside
No one knows the ins and outs of successful companies better than bestselling author Jason Jennings. Back in 2001, with It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small, It’s the Fast That Eat the Slow, Jennings proved that speed was the ultimate competitive advantage. But in 2015, companies of all sizes still struggle to adapt quickly. They know it’s crucial to their future but need help to get everyone implementing speed and urgency at all levels.
Jennings and his researchers have spent years up close and personal with thousands of organizations around the world—figuring out what makes them successful in both the short and long term. He understands the real challenges that keep more than eleven thousand CEOs, business owners, and executives up at night. And he knows how the best of the best combine speed and growth to deliver five times the average returns to shareholders.
The High-Speed Company reveals the unique practices of businesses that have proven records of urgency and growth. The key distinction is that they’ve created extraordinary cultures with a strong purpose, more trust, and relentless follow-through. These companies burn less energy, beat the competition, and have a lot of fun along the way.
Jennings shows how you can implement the same strategies that have made companies such as CoBank, O’Reilly Auto Parts, Grainger, Henry Schein, Google, and Johnson & Johnson great, including:
• Encouraging employees to make the right moves without hesitation. J.M. Smucker has done this well by creating five guiding principles that employees at every level can apply to faster individual decision making.
• Doing more to constantly innovate and bring in new customers. Besides spending more than $2 billion on research and development, Procter & Gamble sends its senior executives to the homes of families who use their products in one hundred different countries, to learn their stories and connect with them, gaining fresh insights for new products.
• Being transparent about management decisions. Sonic Corp. knows this is the best way to drive trust and engagement with both employees and customers.
Breathe easier. Handle any hurdle. Get things done faster. That’s the way of the high-speed company . . . and Jennings shows you how to build and sustain your own.
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Regularly talking with and listening to customers and prospective customers. The program will depend on the size of your business and the resources available, but no organization will ever become a high-speed company without having an institutionalized program of listening to the marketplace. The best advice for setting up such a program is what I learned living at our lake house during the summer. Sometimes ice doesn’t melt on our lake in far-northern Michigan until the middle of May, which.
But once in a while something can go wrong for them too, and they’ll need to apologize to a customer or customers. In 2013 trendy yoga-wear company Lululemon got into hot water when complaints came to light about its yoga pants being “too sheer.” Lululemon’s cofounder and chairman Chip Wilson said that the reason the pants were too sheer was because “they don’t work for certain women’s bodies.” Yikes! He was heard by women everywhere to be saying, “You might be too fat to wear our pants.” When.
What they want—they explain everything in clear language so that every member of their organization understands their assignments and the ultimate purposes, principles, and goals of their company. Make It Okay to Make Mistakes When a missile launch went disastrously wrong at the World War II German rocket-development facility led by Wernher von Braun, an engineer quickly fessed up to his error—and received a bottle of champagne from his boss for his honesty. Von Braun knew if he humiliated or.
Questions are the questions that force you to explain your assumptions and embedded routines. They’re great for clearing out the cobwebs and getting us to address the heart of the matter.” Questioning long-held assumptions can appear to waste time. That’s especially common in the 80 percent of companies that don’t keep track of their rates of follow-through. Memories are convenient and they mostly confirm how awesome a given company thinks it is. Cold research says otherwise. Probably the best.
There’s enough to go around for everyone or they come from a position of scarcity, don’t believe there’s enough to go around, and are determined to get as much as they can as quickly as they can. Leaders who don’t believe there’s enough to go around become takers. Eventually they will be surrounded by others who share their negative view of the world. These are not good ingredients for building a fast company. I first interviewed David O’Reilly ten years ago for my book Think Big, Act Small,.