Speed

Dave Girouard, CEO of personal finance startup UpStart, knows a thing or two about speed. He brought a sense of urgency to every meeting, every discussion, and every decision he made while at Google's Enterprise Apps division. This week, we highlight a piece he wrote on how a speedy culture can be part of your organization's competitive advantage and how to encourage that culture from the top down. 

Speed in making decisions 

"Too many people believe that speed is the enemy of quality. To an extent they’re right — you can’t force innovation and sometimes genius needs time and freedom to bloom. But in my experience, that’s the rare case. There’s not always a stark tradeoff between something done fast and done well. Don’t let you or your organization use that as a false shield or excuse to lose momentum. The moment you do, you lose your competitive advantage."

Speed doesn't have to come with a direct trade off to quality. The most important decisions often take time to make, but the vast majority of day-to-day decisions within an organization need not take more than 10 minutes:

"If, by way of habit, you consistently begin every decision-making process by considering how much time and effort that decision is worth, who needs to have input, and when you’ll have an answer, you'll have developed the first important muscle for speed. This isn’t to say all decisions should be made quickly. Some decisions are more complicated or critical than others. It might behoove you to wait for more information. Some decisions can’t be easily reversed or would be too damaging if you choose poorly. Most importantly, some decisions don’t need to be made immediately to maintain downstream velocity."

This type of operational culture is built from the top down by encouraging speed as a priority from the bottom up. Girouard offers clear advice for leaders who want to accomplish tasks and make decisions faster: 

"Questions are your best weapon against inertia."

Speedy service or delivery of goods

"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."

While Girouard operates in the tech industry, the concept of speed is relative to your industry. In some industries, 8 seconds could be too slow and in others 8 weeks could be incredibly fast. But the bottom line is, as Jeff Bezos has aptly observed, customers are only going to desire faster service going forward. To ensure faster delivery of a product or faster service for customers, leadership must ensure team members are working in parallel (not in sequential order) on tasks and remove all possible dependencies:

"Just as important as assigning a deadline, you need to tease out any dependencies around an action item. This might be obvious, but mission critical items should be absolutely gang tackled by your team in order to accelerate all downstream activities. Things that can wait till later need to wait."

Speed is a choice for organizations and most importantly, for leadership. To use a rowing analogy, leadership serves as the coxswain and sets the cadence for the organization. If speed is expected from employees but not shown at the executive level, this type of hypocrisy leads to apathy and disdain at the bottom. Speed starts at the top. 

Speed as a habit (David Girouard)

+ "Today at Upstart, we’re a much smaller company, and we’re making decisions that matter several times a day. We’re deeply driven by the belief that fast decisions are far better than slow ones and radically better than no decisions. From day to day, hour to hour, we think about how important each decision is and how much time it’s worth taking. There are decisions that deserve days of debate and analysis, but the vast majority aren’t worth more than 10 minutes."

Dura Software's playbook for managing small businesses and teams (Michael Girdley)

+ Michael Girdley is the founder of Dura Software, a company that purchases mission critical software companies and operates them under the Dura holding company. He has openly published his holding company's 'playbook' for leading teams, hiring, marketing, and more for anyone interested.

Bruised egos, gobs of money, and the bitter feud that took down Cellino & Barnes, New York’s absurdly ubiquitous accident law firm (Intelligencer)

+ "The fight revealed more than just financial dirty laundry and wounded feelings. It captured the birth and boom of what has become one of the most caricatured areas of the law — a pop-culture staple that often earns its reputation as ambulance chasing but also delivers on its promise as one of the most direct ways to bring justice, and fair compensation, to the least powerful members of society. It is a world that isn’t going away anytime soon, even if the men who elevated the New York car-crash lawsuit to a kind of high art have themselves joined the ranks of the injured."

Tracking the recovery (Tracktherecovery.org)

+ Raj Chetty at Harvard University has created a powerful database to track consumer spending, employment, and business activity by socioeconomic class and location. 

To Save Its Monuments, Rome Seeks Corporate Sponsors (Bloomberg)

+ "Brands, Romans, countrymen, lend me your sponsorship! So goes the call to arms for the city of Rome, whose revered yet financially burdensome historic center faces a dire new threat: devastating budget cuts due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Italian capital has often sought out novel approaches to finance the monumental task of restoring and maintaining its sprawling stock of fountains, statues, historic palazzi and ancient archaeological sites. The city’s latest idea is a two-year deal with Confindustria, a national association of thousands of Italian companies, which will facilitate “acts of patronage and sponsorship” toward a list of sites and monuments in need of funds."

Candy or Covid? Some places are canceling Halloween amidst the ongoing pandemic (Bloomberg)

+ "In much the same way that the U.S. approach to reopening schools has been piecemeal, the vision for Halloween 2020 differs from city to city, with no guidance yet from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention despite pressure from lawmakers. There is detailed guidance drafted, perhaps not so surprisingly, by the Hershey Co., which told the Wall Street Journal that the holiday makes up a tenth of its annual $8 billion revenue, and that trick-or-treating makes up about half of the company’s Halloween candy sales."

Are founders allowed to lie? (Alex Danco)

+ "You probably don’t call it “lying”, but founders have to will an unlikely future into existence. To build confidence in everyone around you – investors, customers, employees, partners – sometimes you have to paint a picture of how unstoppable you are, or how your duct tape and Mechanical Turk tech stack is scaling beautifully, or tell a few “pre-truths” about your progress. Hey, it will be true, we’re almost there, let’s just say it’s done, it will be soon enough. Here’s Byrne Hobart on Microsoft: Microsoft’s march to a $1.54tr market value started with the company selling a product it had not, in fact, built. Bill Gates and Paul Allen contacted computer manufacturer MITS to sell them a BASIC interpreter. They scheduled a demo, and built their interpreter. Or rather, first they built an emulator for the Altair (which they didn’t have) to run on Harvard’s computers (which they didn’t have permission to use) in order to write their interpreter (which Allen finished on the flight to the meeting). Subsequent success turned that from a lie to an endearing exaggeration, although Microsoft’s later successes gave the story a sinister cast once again."

The elusive peril of space junk (The New Yorker)

+ "Never before had the I.S.S. faced such a high probability of collision on such short notice. Moving the station was out of the question. Instantly, he relayed the news to Houston’s flight director, Ed Van Cise, and then rushed to Mission Control, where he joined a tense meeting to discuss the options. There was only one: instruct the crew to lock down the station—closing hatches between modules—and then shelter in the Soyuz capsule, a Russian vessel that can serve as a lifeboat. There were three people aboard the I.S.S.: one American, Scott Kelly, and two Russians, Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko. In the Soyuz, they could detach from the failing structure and return to Earth. In the station’s history, its crew had sheltered in the Soyuz only three other times."

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