Strategic Speed: How to Accelerate Execution

Jocelyn Davis: Yes, it's a great question because one of the reasons that we wrote the book was to put forward a different definition of speed from what most people are used to or how most people think about speed so when we talk about speed we don't mean just going quickly from A to B, just thinking about it as many leaders think about it, which is just sort of getting a lot done or getting things done on time. When we talk about speed, we're talking about our definition is "reducing time to value and increasing value over time." So the difference is, when we did our research and we looked at how successful leaders think about speed, they thought about it not as just sort of a race to the finish but more as a matter of getting people and teams and initiatives up into a place where they are actually creating value more quickly, so getting them to the point where they are not just adding noise or static to the system but actually adding something of substantial value more quickly than they otherwise would.

Rachel Salaman: I suppose the worry that comes up when people talk about speed is that somehow you will be losing quality by rushing forward and not applying your usual attention to detail or whatever it is, how do you address that?

Jocelyn Davis: Yes, exactly, so this is where the needing to bring value into the formula or into the equation is critical because if you talk about speed without bringing the value perspective in, then you are in danger of saying just, well we got all that done and we answered hundreds of calls in our call center yesterday or we opened up five new stores in these markets last year, well that's great, that's a lot of activity but are you actually achieving the goals that you set out to achieve, are you getting the results, are you adding the value that you wanted to add because if not, then you haven't really done anything, you are more like a hamster in a wheel going round and round very quickly but not getting anywhere.

Rachel Salaman: How important is speed by your definition in today's business world?

Jocelyn Davis: It is very important. In fact one of the things that we talk about in the book is certain companies that today are really competing on speed so just a couple of examples, like H&M, the Swedish fashion retailer, they can take a garment from design to hanger in just twenty days and that's one tenth the average for the industry. Another example would be from India, ICICI Bank, which is the second largest bank in India and they have this online trading platform, it's the third busiest online trading platform in the world and when they set out to build it, they built it in 90 days. So there are many examples of companies today that are competing on speed and really using that approach to outpace and get better results from companies that are still competing only on things like customer service and cost efficiency and quality, which are all great things but there are certain companies that are really taking speed as their point of differentiation.

Rachel Salaman: What research went into this book?

Jocelyn Davis: A lot of research. We did 18 case studies which really looked at initiatives in organizations that were unusually fast and successful, those were in companies around the world, many different industries. Then we did literature reviews, many books and articles, then we did a survey working with The Economist Intelligence Unit, they helped us and we surveyed about 350 leaders in almost as many companies around the world to figure out what were the real differences between the characteristics of faster and slower companies.

Rachel Salaman: What were the main points of your findings, the headlines?

Jocelyn Davis: Well the main point, the single main point is that speed is really about the people and that's in contrast with what some leaders think speed is about which is either, we talk about two traps that leaders fall into: there is over attention to pace and over attention to process. There are some leaders who focus a lot on pace, which is just thinking that speed is just a matter of sort of going fast so I'll encourage everybody to hurry up and do more and get it done but then there are also leaders who make another kind of mistake which is focusing too much on re-engineering processes to be more efficient, thinking that if you can just get the processes and the systems and the technology all lined up, then things will go faster. But the key finding from our research is when we looked at the faster companies versus the slower companies, the things that drove speed in the faster companies were not really pace, not really process but they were people factors.

Rachel Salaman: In your book you go into this in quite a lot of detail and you split the people factors into three – clarity, unity and agility. Why these three in particular?

Jocelyn Davis: Well those were the three that in the survey that we did that I mentioned, then we went on and did more surveys to validate our findings, those were the three that rose to the top as being predictive of speed, so if you, we actually have a tool in the book that we call the Speedometer, which is based on those three – clarity, unity and agility – and there are nine specific items that are about clarity, unity and agility and what we found in our research is that those nine items are really the things that are the factors that drive speed, more so than anything else.

Rachel Salaman: Could you explain that in a little more detail?

Jocelyn Davis: Sure. So for example under agility, one of the items is about capturing learnings and using learning from projects to course correct, to be agile and change course as you go so that you can move more quickly, so that's the specific item under agility. A specific item under unity would be for example ensuring that everybody is fully committed to the strategy of the organization and understands it fully and wants to go there. So those nine items are different environmental characteristics that as a leader you would want to aim for because if you do aim for them, if you are firing on all nine of those cylinders, then you can be pretty certain that your company or your team or your business unit is going to be faster than others.

Rachel Salaman: So if we bring this back to a practical vision, what does it look like when business leaders get clarity right? If we just start with that first people factor, clarity.

Jocelyn Davis: There is an interesting example in the book taken from Thermo Fisher which is a scientific products company and this is just one example but Kurt Kimmler who was a Senior Vice President there in their sales organization, he really succeeded in driving clarity by streamlining and reducing the clutter in the organization so a lot of times people sort of assume that clarity is just a matter of just saying over and over again this is our strategy, this is our strategy and let me remind you again, this is our strategy, and what they don't always see is for people to be clear about what the strategy is, they have to have a clear sense of what does that mean for them and they have to be able to see a clear path forward.

In the Thermo Fisher example, this particular organization, they had their sales organization, everybody, all the sales people had, it was some huge number, something like 120 reports that they were having to file every month and it was the chemical engineering report and the this report and the that report, just hundreds of them. What Kurt Kimmler did when he came in as the leader of the sales organization is he said right, we're going to do a spring cleaning, he brought the sales organization together and he said, the first thing we're going to do is cut these sales reports down to, I think it was 20. So he cut 80 percent of these reports out and his idea was that, as he put it, you have to lower the water in the system so you can see the rocks. So that you can see the things that you are going to run into, the stumbling blocks, if you will. We saw that over and over again in the case studies that we did, that leaders seeking clarity really needed to simplify and streamline so that people can literally see where they are going.

Rachel Salaman: What about unity, what does unity look like on the ground?

Jocelyn Davis: Unity, again a number of interesting examples. There's one that I wanted to share that is actually not in the book but it is one of the organizations that we've worked with and it is Häagen-Dazs. A few years ago they were looking to drive their brand into their retail shops, they have about 550 retail ice cream shops around the world and the service in those shops was not reflecting their brand, it was actually undermining their brand, so we were working with them to translate their brand into the experience in these shops. The challenge was that they had this incredibly complex ownership structure, so you have some of the, about 150 of the shops are wholly owned by Häagen-Dazs, some of them are these super-franchisees, somebody might own all the shops in one country or one region and then they have the tiny franchisees, so just one person owning one shop. Then they have country managers as well who are overseeing all the operations in a country, so a very complex structure.

Now this program that we were helping Häagen-Dazs with to translate their brand into the customer experience in their shops, all of the shop owners, the franchisees and the wholly owned shops, they all had to put up money to pay for this program and for this training and then the country managers had to approve of it and then Häagen-Dazs and General Mills, their owner, and all the layers of the chain had to approve of everything. So long story short, we had this launch meeting with them, it was a one day launch meeting and it ended up that we took seven hours just to do a stakeholder map, mapping out all the different people who had to buy into this initiative and then it took about 10 minutes to do the other stuff that we had to do but most of the meeting was just this mapping out the stakeholders. The big a-ha insight in the meeting was that wow, this is a huge unity challenge and we've got to get on top of this.

So Clive Chesser, who was the Head of Operations for Häagen-Dazs, had this a-ha moment when he realized that this is going to have to be our focus for the whole, before we even start designing this program, doing anything, we've got to get buy in and he actually went to the CEO of General Mills who had been asking for this initiative to be done in a year, he went to the CEO and said, do you know what, we're not going to do it in a year because it's going to take us almost a year just to get the buy in from these thousands of people around the world. So we and Clive Chesser spent nine months to a year, before implementing any of the programs, going round and visiting every single country manager, every single franchisee, making the case for the initiative, explaining why this was important. We also decided to do a pilot in just 19 shops to show the benefits of this program. The pilot went extremely well and the shops in the pilot got much better results than the control group, so it was a good case for the initiative and in the end, what happened is that the CEO had wanted this done in a year but their average time for this sort of initiative at General Mills was three years and in the end the entire initiative was completed in two years. So it was an example of not the kind of pace that the CEO originally wanted but ended up being done much faster than the average initiative at Häagen-Dazs because of this incredible effort to build unity up front.

Rachel Salaman: So sometimes you have to slow down in order to speed up.

Jocelyn Davis: Yes.

Rachel Salaman: The third people factor is agility, you spoke a little about that earlier, could you explain in a bit more detail what agility looks like?

Jocelyn Davis: Yes, agility is an interesting one because many people, writers and thinkers, when they talk about agility today, they talk about it as if it is mostly a matter of sensing and responding, so having better sensing abilities to know what's going on in the marketplace and what should we be responding to, changes in the marketplace and that's important, of course, but what we found in our case studies is that the faster companies and more successful leaders, it was really more a matter of not so much noticing when there has been a change, because it is pretty easy to notice when there's been a change or a barrier has come up or an obstacle is in your way. It is not so hard to sense that, what's difficult is to have a group of people who are willing to turn and adapt their approach. Keep moving forward but not be fazed by the fact that this change has come up so to have almost the tenacity to keep moving ahead, which is not something people usually associate with agility.

Rachel Salaman: Leadership is obviously really important and in the book you present four critical leadership practices that interact with the three people factors we've been talking about to produce what you call strategic speed. The first of these leadership practices is affirm strategies, what do you mean by that?

Jocelyn Davis: Affirming strategies is, I can best explain by contrasting it with what it's not. What it's not is simply formulating correct strategies. In each of these leadership practices we found that there are some things that less successful leaders do and in the case of affirming strategies, less successful leaders focus more on the formulation of the strategy and they spend a lot of time doing analysis and getting it right, or what they think is right. The more successful leaders and the faster teams in companies spend much more time in ensuring not just that the strategy is correct but also that it is clearly understood by everyone and that everyone has been to some extent involved in shaping that strategy so that they feel a good deal of buy in. So it's really about, when we say affirming we mean making sure that it is clearly understood and also bought into.

Many of the examples in that chapter are about leaders who simply brought people into the process so didn't just sit behind closed doors and then come out and say here's the strategy, but held meetings and went through one on ones with people and had, either in small or large gatherings over a short period of time or a long period of time, but simply brought people in and gave them an opportunity to shape and own the strategy.

Rachel Salaman: The second leadership practice is drive initiatives. How exactly can people do that?

Jocelyn Davis: Yes, this is I think my personal favorite of the four leadership practices because this is going to sound dull but a lot of it really about project management and the interesting thing that we found is that in many organizations today, its senior leaders assume that project management or driving initiatives or projects is not something for them to do, it is something for them to delegate down into the organization and I think it's because many senior leaders, well first they feel they don't have time but they also feel that that's what they should be doing, they should be sort of just sponsoring initiatives and staying at that high level but then delegating the real work of driving the project down into their teams, into the organization.

What we found is that there were a number of examples of leaders who were much more successful at achieving strategic speed because even though they were at a senior level, they took it upon themselves to stay involved and engaged and not that they were micro-managing or needing do the day to day project management but for example, Informer is actually our parent company but we did a case study on them. Their CEO is Peter Rigby and he drove an acquisition several years ago, acquired a company called IIR, another large media company – Informer is a media company itself. One interesting thing is that it only took them five days to sign the deal which was incredibly quick, but more important, it only took them 90 days to make the deal work and that's because Peter Rigby put together an implementation team that he led personally and made sure that people issues were the focus of that team, so he and this team of leaders went around to every single company, hundreds of offices in this company that were acquired, and spent time talking to every leader, every manager in the newly acquired company explaining what the purpose of the acquisition was, how they saw their role, asking them to stay rather than leave and really bringing everybody on board.

They focused on that for 90 days so by the end of those three months, the new company had been really fully integrated into Informer so they ended up with that rare thing which is an acquisition that actually adds value because by the end of the 90 days they were fully integrated and then those acquired companies went on to grow their turnover significantly and the main reason for that was that Rigby didn't just say, well I'm the CEO so I'll sort of delegate all of that to others, he took personal responsibility for driving that initiative all the way through.

Rachel Salaman: Now what about managed climate, this is the third leadership practice, what do you mean by that?

Jocelyn Davis: So climate is what it feels like to work in a place, it's that simple. It's different from a culture because culture is something that takes a long time to change, climate is surprisingly quick to change, climate can turn on a dime, so we like to say that climate is the fast aspect of culture. It is sort of culture on speed, if you will and managing climate is something that Forum has actually done a lot of research on it over the past 30 years, climate is one of the most powerful drivers of performance and results, so it is not something that is just squishy and everybody feeling nice. Our research and a lot of other research has shown it to be a very powerful driver of performance because how people feel, what the workplace feels like has a direct impact on people's motivation, their ability to do their work, performance and results.

The other interesting thing about climate is that it's highly, highly impacted by what leaders do, it's not just what the CEO does, it's not the external environment, it's not the company history, it's really impacted by what your manager does from day to day, what your direct manager does so managing climate is one of the things that helps with what we call everyday execution. So the first two, affirming strategies and driving initiatives are really helpful for initiative execution, making initiatives go more quickly, managing climate is about speeding up and improving all the tasks and activities and projects that make up the daily life of an organization and there are specific climate dimensions that we describe in the book, that if leaders pay attention to those dimensions and use those specific practices to improve the climate of an organization then the team or the organization will go more quickly.

Rachel Salaman: And the fourth leadership practice is cultivate experience, how does that work?

Jocelyn Davis: So cultivating experience, I said driving initiatives was my favorite but I think cultivating experience is actually my favorite. Cultivating experience is, there was a real difference between, in our research in this practice between the faster companies and the slower companies because the faster companies did a lot more reflecting, capturing learning, taking time to step back and say okay, how are we doing, let's do an after action review of this project, let's pause and see where we are in terms of meeting our goals or on our metrics so a lot more attention to not just act, act, act but interspersing the action with reflection and capturing the insights and the ideas and the learning from all sorts of employees. So when we say cultivating experience, the metaphor we like to use is a little bit like green energy because in the world you have the sun shining, you have the wind blowing, you have all this energy around but most of it is not harnessed or captured.

The same thing in organizations, you have so much experience and insight and ideas and learning that is going on all the time but if it's not captured and harnessed and made visible and shared, then it's like the sun and the wind and the water, it is all flowing away and is not being put to use. But if you can harness it, and again this is a big thing that faster companies do, they have explicit ways to harness that learning and their leaders pay a lot of attention to that and that helps them capture those insights and use them to drive forward.

Rachel Salaman: Throughout the book you stress the importance of measuring company and team speed, what metrics and tools do you suggest people use for this?

Jocelyn Davis: You know it's more about the mindset, not so much about specific tools because every industry, every company is going to have specific types of goals and have their own metrics that they should use because it is specific to them but the mindset, we found there were three different ways to think about measuring speed and two of them are okay but one of them is really best.

The first one is what we call the Hamster Wheel which is the mindset which says what you measure is just pace of activity, so how many calls are we answering, how many sales calls are we making, how much stuff are we doing every day and we call it the Hamster Wheel because you can just be running round in circles and not really getting anywhere. The other is what we call the drag race, so how fast did we complete this project, how quickly did we get to launch this new marketing campaign, how quickly did we get from A to B?

That's a little better than the Hamster Wheel because at least you are measuring did you get anywhere but the best way to think about measuring speed, and it goes back to what I said about our definition at the beginning of our chat, is to think about it more like a track record in racing, so it's not just in this particular race did you get to the end, but rather what's your track record on this track? How many races are you winning, how is your team doing in terms of like your pit crew that prepares your car to go, how fit are you as a driver and are you able to stay competitive over the long haul? So it is back to that not just reducing time to value but also increasing value over time and that is the right mindset we need to have when it comes to measuring speed.

Rachel Salaman: Now your book is obviously focused on the strategic, macro approach to accelerating business and business success. What about the micro level, what can individuals do to make sure they perform well but fast as well?

Jocelyn Davis: Well that's actually the real reason we wrote the book is even though we talk about companies and we looked at faster versus slower companies, the real reason we wrote the book is to be helpful to individual leaders at any level of an organization who are struggling with what so many leaders struggle with which is just how can we get things done more quickly and reliably. I don't know a single leader who is satisfied with the speed of execution, forget about the company but just in his or her team, the projects that they do every day.

The analogy that I always use is when you have somebody come in to redo your kitchen and they are going to remodel and you ask them how long is it going to take and the guy says, oh it will take eight weeks maximum and you always think, it's really going to take 12 weeks or 16 weeks. You know, you just sort of accept, we all accept that things are going to take longer and I think for a lot of leaders that's true, they just assume well, things are going to take a longer time, that's the way it goes. We wanted to write a book that would be helpful to leaders who feel like they are still putting their head in their hands after a meeting and saying, why do things take so long to get done around here? So the tools that appear in the book and the practices and the assessments are all geared to helping individual leaders figure out what can they do right now, what can they be focusing on in terms of the people factors, that can really help them speed up execution in their team?

Rachel Salaman: Jocelyn Davis, talking to me in London. The name of her book again is "Strategic Speed: Mobilize People, Accelerate Execution," co-authored with Henry Frechette Junior and Edwin Boswell.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.