đââď¸How To Cultivate Speed
Hello! Adam Thornhill here. âThe Podcast Guyâ saving you 10 hours a week.
Enjoy the 140th Podup, with special thanks to RhinoRating.
Today, weâll dive into the best insights and ideas from Founders Journal.
Ever heard of David Girouard? Me neither, until this episode. Apparently heâs a big deal â heâs CEO of the unicorn Upstart and former President of Google Enterprise Apps.
Alex Lieberman breaks down Davidâs influential essay âSpeed as a Habitâ to help you and I embrace speed in our own business.
Make speed part of your culture
Speed is the ultimate weapon in business. Itâs the defining characteristic in virtually every industry you look at.
Little is written about how to develop the institutional muscle necessary to make speed a serious competitive advantage.
Speed, like exercise and eating healthy, can be habitual. With a prolonged and proactive effort to develop these good habits, we can convert ourselves as founders, executives, and employees to be faster, more efficient company building machines.
When enough team members exhibit these habits and are rewarded with reinforcement, compensation, and promotion, the organization itself will gain velocity. This is how category killers are made.
So, what are the building blocks of speed? When you think about it, all business activity comes down to 2 simple things: making decisions and executing decisions. You need to make speed a habit in both.
Alex Lieberman
Execute decisions quickly
People spend a lot of time refining their productivity systems and to do lists.Â
Instead, challenge the when.
Iâm always shocked by how many plans and action items come out of meetings without being assigned due dates.
You just have to ask:
Can you help me understand why something would take so long?
Is there anything we can do to help make it go faster?
Questions are your best weapon against inertia. Asking them habitually can have a profound impact on the speed of your organization.
You donât have to be militant about it, just consistently respond that today is better than tomorrow, and right now is better than 6 hours from now.
Alex Lieberman
Recognize and remove dependenciesÂ
You need to tease out any dependencies around an action item.
This may be obvious, but itâs mission critical.
You donât want people waiting on each other in order to take next steps.
The untrained mind has a weird way of defaulting to serial activities: Iâll do this after you do that after X, Y, Z happens.
A lot of people assume dependencies when they donât even exist.
Instead, you want people working in parallel.Â
Alex Lieberman
Why it matters
Thereâs no doubt that speed is essential, but speed for speed sake isnât helpful. You must move in the right direction to create momentum. This allows you to quickly adapt, maintain morale, and capitalize on opportunities as they arise.
Next steps
Review your decision making process. Identify bottlenecks in decision making and find ways to overcome this.
Set immediate deadlines. Set an expectation that tasks are assigned due dates, ideally in hours not days.
Clarify dependencies. Regularly review projects for unnecessary dependencies to minimize wait times between tasks.
Reward speed. Recognize and reward team members who exemplify the ability to act quickly and efficiently.
Continuously refine. Make speed a topic of regular discussion, encouraging feedback on how to improve and maintain momentum.
Your thoughts?
More from Podup
Speed is essential for newsjacking. Read how the Reddit Revolt could have presented a real business opportunity.
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Quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Sentences were left out to make the narrative more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast.