- The pace of change has never been faster,
yet, this is the slowest the change will be
from this point forward.
That may sound funny, but
if you think about it, it's definitely true.
Here's an example of how fast the pace of change has gotten.
It took automobiles 62 years to reach 50 million users.
It took the telephone 50,
electricity 46, credit cards 28, and television 22.
Fast-forward a bit, and it took the Internet seven years,
PayPal five years, Facebook three years,
and Twitter two years.
Now there are games such as Fortnite
that take a matter of months to reach 50 million users.
Many businesses don't have an approach
to be as fast as this new reality dictates.
Let me offer a few thoughts
on how to pick up the pace of your business.
Think of the acronym STAC, as the path forward.
This stands for Simplification,
Transparency, Accountability, and Collaboration.
Simplification is the first step toward speed.
Companies tend to be better at building
and integrating the new than retiring the old and redundant.
By not doing the important work of identifying processes
or technologies that are redundant or obsolete,
your company will be weighed down by its own complexity.
Therefore, it's important to catalog all of your processes
and technologies, identify the lifespan of each of those
that ought to be retired,
while also identifying where you have two
or three solutions that do the same thing.
Next, transparency will ensure
you reach your destination more quickly.
It's important to develop well-articulated strategic plans
that highlight where your company
is headed for the foreseeable future.
It's important to ensure
that those plans also connect with the work
that your team is doing,
so they understand how the projects they
are pursuing for example
are pushing the company
in the direction articulated by the plans.
By rendering your plans transparent,
everyone will understand the strategy while pushing
in the same direction.
It's also important that your organization feels accountable
for what it's delivering.
The key to accountability is measurement.
That which gets measured gets done.
It's important to employ metrics broadly
to gauge the health of the business
and assign people for each of the metrics
that are evaluated, so that each
of them ultimately is responsible
for driving the performance metrics in the right direction.
Lastly, it's essential to collaborate more broadly.
This means collaborating
with colleagues across the traditional disciplines
of the organization, as more value is now derived
at the intersection of functions
like marketing and information technology for example.
It also means collaborating with an ecosystem
of partners from strategic vendors
to the venture capital community to your peers
and other companies to broaden the sources of inspiration
that might lead to innovation.
It also means collaborating
to a greater extent with customers to test ideas
and gauge their enthusiasm.
By simplifying, rendering your plans transparent,
making people more accountable
and collaborating more broadly,
the number of ideas should increase
and the speed to execute upon those ideas
should increase as well.