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

Jennings, Jason; Haughton, Laurence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1591847362 ISBN 13: 9781591847366

Verlag: Portfolio, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

The only way to ensure your company’s success is to change faster on the inside than the world is changing on the outside

No one knows the ins and outs of successful companies better than bestselling author Jason Jennings. Back in 2001, with It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small, It’s the Fast That Eat the Slow, Jennings proved that speed was the ultimate competitive advantage. But in 2015, companies of all sizes still struggle to adapt quickly. They know it’s crucial to their future but need help to get everyone implementing speed and urgency at all levels.

Jennings and his researchers have spent years up close and personal with thousands of organizations around the world—figuring out what makes them successful in both the short and long term. He understands the real challenges that keep more than eleven thousand CEOs, business owners, and executives up at night. And he knows how the best of the best combine speed and growth to deliver five times the average returns to shareholders.

The High-Speed Company reveals the unique practices of businesses that have proven records of urgency and growth. The key distinction is that they’ve created extraordinary cultures with a strong purpose, more trust, and relentless follow-through. These companies burn less energy, beat the competition, and have a lot of fun along the way.

Jennings shows how you can implement the same strategies that have made companies such as CoBank, O’Reilly Auto Parts, Grainger, Henry Schein, Google, and Johnson & Johnson great, including:

   •  Encouraging employees to make the right moves without hesitation. J.M. Smucker has done this well by creating five guiding principles that employees at every level can apply to faster individual decision making.
   •  Doing more to constantly innovate and bring in new customers. Besides spending more than $2 billion on research and development, Procter & Gamble sends its senior executives to the homes of families who use their products in one hundred different countries, to learn their stories and connect with them, gaining fresh insights for new products.
   •  Being transparent about management decisions. Sonic Corp. knows this is the best way to drive trust and engagement with both employees and customers.

Breathe easier. Handle any hurdle. Get things done faster. That’s the way of the high-speed company . . . and Jennings shows you how to build and sustain your own.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JASON JENNINGS is a bestselling author of research-based business books, including The Reinventors, Think BIG, Act Small, and Less Is More. USA Today has called him one of the three most in-demand business speakers in the world. He also hosts a free weekly podcast that digs deeper into the material presented in his books. He and his family split their time between Tiburon, California, and Timber Rock Shore in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Laurence Haughton has served as the SVP and head of research and development for Jennings’s consulting practice and has been Jennings’s writing partner on five

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

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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:

   • Solve problems the first time rather than revisiting them again and again
   • Keep good customers from defecting
   • Empower the 70 percent of all employees who say they’re not engaged or actively disengaged (per...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Portfolio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1591847362
• ISBN 13: 9781591847366
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: M.E.G Cards & Gifts; 443000000000; paula@megcards.com; ; 48 Cloyfin Road; Unit 4, 48 Cloyfin Road; Coleraine; Londonderry; BT52 2NY; Irland