Managing with speed

By Pedro Nueno

Strategy and speed are two key characteristics of companies that want to survive in an environment as demanding as the current one. After the international standstill caused by the covid-19 pandemic, the business world needs to go faster, and this requires a constant incorporation of technologies and innovation in all areas of the company, capable and motivated staff and financial resources enough to face the crisis, among many other things. In these pages, Professor Nueno exposes the fundamental tools that business organizations and managers must consider to adapt to new demands. Managing with Speed is a book to read slowly and understand that speed is the key to success today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Plataforma
• Release date: Oct 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9788418582202

Book preview

1.

Gaining speed

I have followed a number of companies with whom I have a good relationship and some have gladly accepted my advice to go faster.

The business world needs to move faster every day and this requires innovation, globalization, capable and motivated staff, financial resources and much more. If we think about what has happened in the automotive industry in the last ten years, we see the emergence of hybrids and electric vehicles, the growth of the Chinese market, the connection of cars to their surroundings through information technologies and new materials. It has always been a pioneering sector in introducing technologies and management models (remember the just-in-time of the 1980s), but there were certainly more changes between 2010 and 2020 than between 2000 and 2010, which we can interpret as an increase in speed.

The emergence of the coronavirus in 2020 will undoubtedly have an impact on the pharmaceutical and medical supply sectors over the next few years. But the need to prevent contagion that has led people to stay at home around the world has stimulated the digitization of life: more online training in schools, universities and colleges; more teleworking, carrying out many transactions from home, but also holding work meetings; more telemedicine; moving online many international events planned for dates when travel and meetings were not possible, and also an increase in sales.

The need to isolate oneself and the availability of mobile phones with high digital capacity, computers, iPads and the large number of instruments and equipment capable of connecting to these media have led many people to learn how to better engage with the digital environment, and this has had an impact on the business world that has again contributed to increase the speed of businesses.

We will try to examine more in depth what this means and how to facilitate it.

2.

What does it mean to move quickly?

Let’s start by thinking about what it means to stand still, something we can see if we think about a case.

I have often explained that when I was a student in the doctoral program at Harvard Business School, I was assigned a prestigious professor to supervise me, but I suppose I was also expected to work for him on business matters of academic interest. One of the most successful companies in the world at the time was Kodak, a North American company based in Rochester, upstate New York, and a world leader in photography. The company was enjoying rapid worldwide growth, and the professor supervising me charged me with writing up a case on that success and the reasons for it. He told me that he had spoken with the chairman, who had told him that he would meet me and answer my questions.

I read as much as I could about Kodak and its industry and called the chairman’s office to ask for an appointment whenever it suited him. Shortly after, the secretary of the big boss called and asked me: Could you be at LaGuardia airport in New York tomorrow at twelve? I replied: Yes, of course. I could not run the risk of the big boss of Kodak shutting me out forever. I arranged with his secretary the exact spot where I should find him. There I was before midday (after flying very early from Boston, where Harvard is located), standing, waiting by a door that seemed to be an exit to where the aeroplanes parked.

After a while, a gentleman came running, followed by two others who were obviously in his service. He said to me: I am the Kodak chairman, are you from Harvard? I replied that I was and he said: Follow me. We went out that door to a small aircraft nearby. The big boss said: I can only attend to you during the trip, you can ask me any questions you have. I thought: Oh my God. Where can this man be going and what will I do when I get there? He was returning to Kodak in his private plane. The truth is that during the trip he was very kind to me and answered my questions fully. But when we got to Rochester airport, we came off the plane and he said: Send me the case when you’ve written it up; good afternoon. And he went towards a waiting car near where his plane had parked. I went into the airport, started searching and managed to find a flight to Boston early next day. I spent the afternoon and night in the airport, writing.

From what this man explained to me, he followed closely what was happening in the photography industry with international deployment. Photography was then chemical and Kodak’s goal was to improve the plastic rolls with a chemical treatment sensitive to images captured by the camera. The rolls then had to be developed to transform their content into photographs. It was very important for him to follow closely any small innovative differences that appeared on the market and find a way to quickly incorporate them into his company, which benefited from its capability to exploit that global innovation. This required buying up small companies, patents or even taking others’ innovations and developing them further to improve them. Of course innovation was hugely important to him and he felt he had the best team in the world. The company grew at great speed, but once the entire market was covered, the speed gradually decreased. Kodak diversified into chemicals, but without much success. The company slowly faded without going into electronic photography and finally collapsed.

Kodak is an example of a company that managed to go very fast but failed to sustain speed and ended up stopping altogether. Its industry underwent a