In Business, Race Goes To The Swiftest
The scourge of every busy venturer is a TO DO list that is compatible only with 25-hour days and eight-day weeks. It seems that an entrepreneur’s only hope lies with an ability to operate constantly on “fast forward.”
Q. Is it my imagination or is the pace of everything in the business world constantly accelerating? My dad, who started this business, used to say “haste makes waste.” My observation is “the faster I go, the behinder I get.”
A. No question, speed is the password to success today.
Business analysts now believe that it won’t be the “big that eat the small” but, rather, the “fast that eat the slow.”
Of course, we’ve long known that rapid action can be a big help to the bottom line. Traditionally, the faster we turned over inventory, delivered the goods, and collected receivables, the more profitable our businesses became.
Entrepreneurs were the ones most afflicted with the “hurry syndrome,” possibly responding to Emerson’s conclusion that “in skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.”
But nowadays, companies large and small are struggling to find new and even better techniques to speed up their operating processes.
“Just-in-time” vendor support now means that component parts arrive exactly when needed, thus reducing the time that money is tied-up in inventory. In many companies, the responsibility for inventory management is being pushed back to suppliers. Wal-Mart, for example, has refined this technique to a science, and its bottom line performance shows it.
Producers, therefore are having to get in step with the pace maintained by their increasingly demanding customers whether they are corporations or other consumers.
According to management guru Tom Peters, “the costs of delay always exceed the costs of mistakes.”
Given the pace of change today, in the time it takes to achieve the comfort of certitude, an original concept can be easily obsoleted or implemented by a competitor.
In this age it is the entrepreneurs who get to the market first or second that have the best opportunity of finding and dominating a niche from which they can generate profitable, sustainable growth. As Ross Perot wisely observed: “ready, fire, aim is always better than ready, aim, aim, aim, aim … “
Even our huge, sometimes bureaucratic corporations are seeing the light. Sony has reduced its mean time from idea to prototype to five days from five months. Production lead time at Bell Helicopter has been cut in half from twenty-four months to twelve. IBM can take an order, build a product and ship it within 24 hours. Chrysler, which used to require four to six months for new car development, produced its Neon in just 33 months.
Not all companies got religion fast enough, however.
Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. dragged its feet in converting it 120-pound printed mainstay to the CD ROM format. As a consequence, the company swung from a fat profit to a fearful loss in just one year.
Remember, technology not only facilitates speed, it demands it. Thanks to swift action and technology, the Gulf War in 1991 lasted only 100 hours!
Help! If you’ve had any experience in the areas listed below, we’d like the opportunity to share your observations and insights with other readers who have asked questions related to these topics:
Compensation of salesmen; providing shares of company stock to employees as an incentive or “golden handcuff”; getting funds from private investors; testing a new idea in the marketplace; hiring your first employee; outsourcing; building “firewalls” between your personal assets and business liabilities; bringing your children into the business; measuring performance on a day- to-day basis; using direct mail and the Internet to market; selling stock to the public; and, buying insurance to protect a business and its owner.
Any other “tips” would also be greatly appreciated.
xxxx
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Paul Willax The Spokesman-Review