How to Execute with Speed
By Michael Kanazawa
Mobilizing teams of people to act with speed and efficiency is a critical component of successful companies. Getting a fast start is especially important when launching a full corporate transformation. Often, taking too much time to debate, over-analyze and over-engineer an approach undermines an entire effort.
Recently, a main artery in the San Francisco Bay Area was shut down due to a tanker fire that actually melted the roadway. Newscasters warned that traffic would be snarled for months, which would have been a major disruption to the regional economy. The contractor selected to fix the problem, C.C. Meyers, stepped up to the task and delivered a solution far faster than anyone expected. Twenty seven days after the accident, people were commuting on that same freeway again. How was the team able to achieve such great speed?
According to Linda Clifford, C.C. Meyers’ chief financial officer, it was all about focus. “Pay attention and focus,” Clifford said. Our company’s just very, very good at mobilizing and realizing what is needed to get there. On much longer projects, she said, “sometimes it’s difficult to be as focused as you need to be. On a job like this, you don’t have that option.”
The lesson for all of us who are striving to turn Big Ideas into Big Results is to keep things simple and focused. Only take on at most three major transformation initiatives at a time and have all departments focus on those same initiatives and outcomes. And after that, accelerate the planning cycle and don’t allow any slack into the system in terms of speed of execution. Take your change process and take as many excess cycles and time lags out as possible. For example, if you are inclined to give a team four weeks to work on a refined mission statement, they will typically do all of the work in the last two weeks (sometimes two days) anyway. So, schedule for only two weeks. It provides less time to waste, more focus of effort on outcomes, and will get you to the overall end result faster.
Speed is a choice and a management discipline, but not often treated that way when applied to how strategic decisions are made and how the overall organization is run. Help teach your team to leverage speed as a way to focus and improve execution. Speed can only come with focus. And the benefit of speed is less time to waste money and resources, greater acceleration of results, and happy customers. Give this approach a try and see how you can focus and drive speed to your advantage.
