Move well and make things

Recently I blogged on my running blog, FitFriend Runs, about how we tend to latch onto extremes. In regards to running anyway, it’s a combination of things that lead to success, rather than one magic pill that we do.

I have had a lot more success when it comes to running than business, so I can say that without any doubt, from what I’ve seen in myself and in many others, that it’s a combination of processes that makes a good athlete.

In our work culture, everybody wants to move fast. It’s trendy!

Dave Girouard singles out speed as the secret weapon in business, it’s the magic pill:

I’ve long believed that speed is the ultimate weapon in business. All else being equal, the fastest company in any market will win. Speed is a defining characteristic — if not the defining characteristic — of the leader in virtually every industry you look at.

This isn’t really accurate. There are many examples in history of companies having waited/been late, maybe being 2nd, 3rd, to market, then owning that market. LinkedIn, Instagram, and even Facebook, are some I can think of off the top of my head.

Accuracy question marks aside, more importantly I don’t believe this mentality is helpful anymore.

Getting back to running, I never made as much progress over 15 years than the recent past 2 years where I slowed down all of my runs, and adopted 80/20 running. Saving my speedy days only for 20% of the week. What is the result? Fastest race times of my life!

Things might be different for well funded VC startups. But in the trenches, most companies I’ve worked for break things more than they build things. This is a problem. Speed is actually slowing them down.

Yesterday I read a write up on a bunch of high profile well funded companies (Fab, Groupon, etc) who have failed because they moved too fast. They didn’t have a quality distinguishing experience.

I’ve worked mostly in places where they throw all process out the door, to the point where nobody knows what each other is working on. There’s no agile, there’s nothing. Why? Because it “wastes too much time”. This seems to be almost like a waterfall model of working, without even knowing it. Because building things in secrecy or with little communication, leads to mutant deliveries that the customer didn’t want.

From what I’ve heard from most other people, is that this is normal now. Moving so fast that you lose track of vision is the status quo. That’s what everybody’s doing! So why would any company wanting to have an edge, do what everybody else is doing?

And we’re seriously confused when we see tweets like this:

Of course that’s what we got! “Move fast and break things” is not the same as “move well and make things”. It starts by us wanting quality first, then we can go from there.

Moving fast should only be very cyclical, it should only apply in certain phases. It only makes up a part of good, quality, market winning, products. Just like in running.

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