The High-Speed Company: Creating Urgency and Growth in a Nanosecond Culture - Hardcover

books. He and his family live in New York City.

Doing Well by Doing Good Uniting everyone around a purpose that accomplishes something meaningful is your only chance at creating a culture of urgency and growth. Give people the why and they’ll give you the how.

The “Shalls” and “Shall Nots” of Speed Blow up all the speed bumps by making certain everyone understands and is empowered to practice the shalls and shall nots of the enterprise.

The Immutable Law of Suckage The immutable law of suckage slammed the brakes on many once-great companies. Here are the rules for never getting to that point.

More Trust, More Engagement, More Urgency In a world weary from too much spin and dishonesty, transparency is the only way to gain trust, engagement, and urgency.

Reliable, Repeatable, and Durable When you systematize everything, from how the phones are answered to how sales calls are made to how the boss schedules her calendar, you create time to do what’s important: quickly grow the business.

Exploration and Discovery High-speed companies have discovered that by being interested instead of interesting, they gain the vital knowledge required to quickly lead people to where they want to go and what they want to accomplish.

Create a Cult of Engagement and Clarity The problem with accountability is that all too many people believe that accountability is great . . . if someone else goes first. Here’s the plan for creating a cult of engagement and clarity and getting everyone to take the leap together.

Keeping Fast People by Your Side Show people the road to prosperity and you’ll crack the code on finding, keeping, and growing the right people and keep everything moving fast.

The Final Piece of the Puzzle Is there one thing that connects all high-speed leaders? Yes. This is the final piece of the high-speed puzzle

Introduction: Urgency and Growth

“We need to create a greater sense of urgency and get things done faster.”

Over the past dozen years, I’ve interviewed over eleven thousand CEOs, business owners, and highly successful entrepreneurs about their businesses and how they lead companies through good times and bad. One of the most important questions I ask them is “What’s the biggest worry keeping you awake at night?”

The response is practically unanimous: Leaders worry about creating a sense of urgency in their organizations and operating quickly in an increasingly complex world. They want to create strong teams that are primed to handle any hurdle that comes their way and “get things done faster.”

To understand why creating a high-speed company is most leaders’ biggest challenge—and best way to ensure business success—all you need to do is recall the story of two huge companies: Sears and Kmart. Do you remember the glory days of Sears and Kmart between the sixties and 2000? Sears was “where America shops,” the number one retailer, followed by a surging Kmart in second place. Walmart was a distant third, not considered worthy of serious attention. I can just imagine the insiders from Chicago scoffing, “Those people are from Arkansas, for crying out loud.”

Watching those two retail giants over the past decade, however, has been like witnessing a train wreck in slow motion. Walmart surpassed Kmart and then Sears. Years of missteps spurred Sears and Kmart to merge into one company, where they completely lost their culture and urgency. Both their number of locations and their combined revenues have withered ten years in a row. As Sears and Kmart executives gather for their daily meeting with CEO Edward Lampert, they are plagued by doubts. “You never know what the plan or strategy is,” one anonymous executive shared in Crain’s Chicago Business. “What are we building? What are the criteria for success?” These once-lauded companies have taken big tumbles, thanks in no small part to operating as low-speed companies in an increasingly fast and complex world.

Meanwhile, Walmart has worked relentlessly to perfect a culture of urgency and growth using many of the strategies detailed in these pages. As of this writing, it’s grown to more than ten thousand locations worldwide and, with a half trillion dollars in annual sales, its revenues are fifteen times those of Sears and Kmart combined. Truly a high-speed company positioned to succeed.

Similarly, look to the trajectories of BlackBerry and Apple—another prime example of how only cultures of growth and urgency survive. Just a few years ago, it was hard to find anyone in business who didn’t have a BlackBerry. But the company, flush with a huge stash of cash, kept repeatedly delaying the release of the BlackBerry 10, confident its customers would wait and arrogantly stating the device’s release would happen when the company was ready. The marketplace refused to wait, and Apple and Samsung swooped in to change the way the world communicates, selling billions of devices within a few years. J. K. Shin of Samsung and Steve Jobs and Tim Cook of Apple keenly understood the need for urgency and led their companies to become two of the world’s most valuable in record-setting time.

The number one priority for business leaders today is creating organizations that work with a fierce sense of urgency in our crazy-busy world and keep their eye firmly fixed on growth. All of my conversations with CEOs and executives identify that pain point—and what I’ve found, and will share in this book, are tactics for building the fastest, most adaptive, strongest organizations that are set up to succeed in this nanosecond environment.

STAY IN THE FAST LANE

In 2014 the consulting firm McKinsey published a report titled “Grow Fast or Die Slow,” an analysis of the fates and fortunes of three thousand software and Internet-services companies. The study concludes that companies that combine urgency and growth (groups growing 60 percent or more a year) deliver five times the returns to shareholders and are eight times more likely to reach $1 billion in revenues. The report also confirms that companies that don’t maintain that culture or that take their foot off the pedal have only a one in three chance of ever getting back in the fast lane. Even in the more forgiving sectors outside of high technology, a lack of urgency and growth is a death knell for organizations. Less than one in two companies get back on the growth highway at all after they stall. Most are acquired, downsize, or go bankrupt.

Some people think that high-speed companies—those that have created a sense of urgency about getting to where they want to go—must be full of type A executives who force their staffs to tolerate incredible stress and be hasty, impulsive, and frantic. Nothing is further from the truth!

High-speed companies actually breathe easier, burn less energy, are never frantic, and get to the destinations they’ve chosen before the competition. Most have a lot of fun along the way. The key to their cultures of urgency and growth is that their leaders have figured out that speed is the thrill, exhilaration, and pride that comes with getting rid of the misguided things that most companies do that end up slowing them down and getting them stuck.

Real cultures of speed and urgency are able to do the following:

It’s not easy to set up a culture ready to execute at this level. It requires stretching your organizational muscles in a way you might not be used to—but it’s the only way to set your company up for success today. And the more deeply you integrate these high-speed practices into your company, the better prepared you will be for whatever lies ahead. After all, who do you think is more out of breath, exasperated, and frantic: the fast folks at Samsung, Apple, and Walmart looking ahead to the next big thing in their industry or the people at BlackBerry, Sears, and Kmart worried about their jobs and the relevance of what their companies do?

BE FAST OR DIE SLOW

The digital revolution that’s just beginning will continue to disrupt and wreak havoc on the traditional ways that all businesses have been led and managed. Eventually everything becomes a commodity and the marketplace sets the price. But now eventually takes days or months instead of years. Further, relationships don’t count as they once did. “It’s all about relationships and getting people to like you” was the advice given by the old-timers to newbies, and it worked well for decades. The global economic meltdown of 2008–9 and the subsequent microscopic scrutiny of every expense mean that no one can justify doing business with someone just because they’re friends. To top it off, unless you’re able to provide skilled workers a future filled with more challenging work, professional growth, and the rewards that go along with it, they’ll leave and either join your competition or become your new competitors.

Unless a company—including yours—is changing faster on the inside than the world is changing on the outside, there’s only grief on the horizon.

And know this: Being fast doesn’t mean announcing you’re going to change the world and then quickly renting offices, hiring a band of cool people, and generating mammoth buzz in social media. Being fast and building a culture of urgency and growth means finding, keeping, and growing the right workers and customers and consistently bringing in enough revenue to reward the people and the investors who made an investment of their time or money in the idea. It means proving you can meet your goals over and over again and showing the marketplace that you’re not a one-trick pony.

OUR RESEARCH

These lessons about what makes a high-speed company aren’t pulled out of thin air—they have been culled over decades of research into hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide.

Laurence Haughton,* my director of research and development, and I, aided by research teams of MBA students and various outside research firms like FactSet and Information On Demand, have evaluated the financial performance of 220,000 businesses, including every publicly traded company in the world, as well as the largest privately held companies in the world.*

Once a company’s financial performance marks it as worthy of further study (and we’ve identified more than fifty thousand whose do) we begin gathering information about its structure, performance, longevity, leadership, and more. We build files and look for vulnerabilities that would disqualify it from inclusion in further research. Reasons for disqualification include being unable to verify financial performance; sudden and significant drops in revenue, profits, or market share; the departure of the leadership team that led the company to greatness; and credible accusations or lawsuits that call the firm’s ethics into question.

Next we try to gain access to the company’s CEO in order to conduct in-depth interviews. This sounds easier than it is. Getting inside these companies is the hardest part of our process; many companies and leaders are very protective of their processes and success. But we’re dogged and determined to find out what makes these winners work, so we cajole, call in favors, ask nicely over and over again, and appeal to people’s sense of fair play. Eventually we get inside these companies (only two have ever shut us out and they went on to fail, which probably means they’d seen the handwriting on the wall and that was why they didn’t give us access) and dig in deep to see how they really tick—and bring you those findings in our book. These pages are the distillation of everything my teams and I have learned about how great companies build cultures based on urgency and growth.

OUR PROMISE

My intention is that any business owner, senior executive, CEO, or entrepreneur be able to read this book and put its contents into practice to build and sustain his or her own high-speed company. Middle managers, without the ability to implement significant change in their organizations, will benefit greatly as well because these findings will prepare them to lead and build cultures of urgency and growth when the opportunity arises.

If you’re ready to get to work and transform your business, I suggest you read the book from start to finish and do the fast tasks found at the end of each chapter before moving on to the next. Following the chapters this way and implementing the takeaways will ensure that you end up with a durable culture that thinks fast and moves faster.

That said, not all people necessarily start at the beginning of a book and read to the end. If you’re faced with a particular business problem, you might prefer to review the table of contents and go directly to the chapter that addresses what’s on your mind at that moment. We’ve arranged the book so that you can use the chapters as a series of applications as well: Find the one that speaks most to what you’re dealing with right now—such as drilling down on your values, transparency, or stewardship—and get to work applying those takeaways to your organization.

Because I travel between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand miles each year, I’ve watched thousands of people read books on airplanes, so this book is also designed as an airplane read. Open any page and you will find something: an inspiration, an insight, or an instruction for going from great idea to fast and flawless execution. This little book is filled with big stories and ideas, even bigger lessons, and a bunch of business heroes who will help you build your high-speed company.

If you put the principles contained in the following pages to work, you will end up with a culture of urgency and growth and be able to succeed in a nanosecond world.

My greatest personal happiness is helping principled people achieve their full economic potential. I hope this book becomes your trusted coach and cheering section all rolled into one. That’s the spirit in which it was researched and written for you.

Jason Jennings
Tiburon, California &
Timber Rock Shore,
Michigamme, Michigan 2014

CHAPTER ONE

Purpose

This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you h...