Strategic Speed

Nine out of 10 leaders believe speed is critical to success, but only four out of 10 believe they are faster than their competition, creating a gap that faster organizations exploit to achieve greater profit and sales growth. Companies that execute faster have an average of 40% higher sales growth and 52% higher operating profit. Yet, most leaders fail to execute strategic initiatives on time, resulting in lost investment and missed opportunity. To increase speed when launching an initiative, effective leaders bring together people from different divisions, roles, and geographies for strategy and training sessions. As long as leaders fail to attend to people factors and incorporate value into their ideas about speed, the best they'll achieve is superficial speed: lots of activity, little forward motion.