Time as a strategic weapon
Sunday thoughts
My flight from the Middle East, where I conducted a strategic workshop for a large retail chain, to İstanbul was delayed for two hours. As a result, I missed my flight to Europe and spent several hours in a cheap hotel provided by the air company (by the way — do you know that an air company must offer you a hotel if a flight is delayed for more than six hours?). I crossed the threshold of my house at 1 am the next day, though I was supposed to be at home twelve hours earlier. I was tired and upset.
During the workshop, the CEO of the company, an experienced professional from Germany, reproached his subordinates for delaying the implementation of a project for a week. They believed that one week is not a big deal, but he thought otherwise.
time must become your best ally
Apple hasn’t been “reinventing” iPhone for many years (as far as I know), and I have serious doubts that Elon Musk will reinvent social media even if (or when) he buys Twitter. Disruptive innovations rarely happen. Most apps on my phone were installed many years ago. The developers update them regularly, but those are incremental improvements, and I am happy with that. But if you opt for step-by-step changes rather than radical modifications, time must become your best ally.
Clumsy organizations
Big organizations are often thought to be clumsy and slow to action because any decision has to travel through many offices before it is made. But it is not the only reason, and I have seen many small and average companies in which every change, even a minor one, took months or years to be implemented. From my point of view, an essential problem is a conflict of interest in the employees’ heads.
corporate culture, KPIs, and C&B must underpin both tasks.
People don’t like changes much, but from my experience, the employees’ resistance to change is overstated by some books’ authors. The core problem is that, on the one hand, senior managers demand ensuring day-to-day results from subordinates, but on the other hand, they ask for changes. Performing processes and improving (or even radically changing) them at the same time is difficult, though manageable. But then corporate culture, KPIs, and C&B must underpin both tasks.
Mindset shift
Converting an organization from a sluggish bureaucracy into a fast-developing startup requires a shift in leaders’ mindsets. It may sound paradoxical, but they need to prioritize development speed over operating results. The typical objection to this idea is that nobody needs “changes for the sake of changes” and that a company must provide the outcomes for the shareholders here and now because it is a sign of its “operational health”.
But we must remember that today’s figures, such as revenue and profit, are the results of yesterday’s changes or improvements (or of the lack of them). Leaders spend a lot of time and effort to improve short-term numbers, but the same time and effort invested in the changes would help them deliver better outcomes in the future.
A culture fostering fast changes — reducing time-to-market for new products, speeding up hypothesizing and testing hypotheses can help a firm outcompete its competitors even without disrupting innovations.
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