In the book, Your Next Five Moves, Patrick Bet-David stresses a critical 
lesson: If You Overdose on Anything, Overdose on Speed. In other words, obsessing over the speed of your productivity drives superior results. Leaders who prioritize execution, efficiency, and rapid pace, consistently outperform their competitors. Just like Ferrari annually improves its acceleration with each new model, Bet-David argues any business process can always become quicker without sacrificing quality.
Take for example Toyota. The famous car manufacturer mastered the production line by addressing assembly line problems in less than a minute. Their ability to rapidly troubleshoot offered Toyota a tremendous industry advantage. Similarly, McDonald’s rose to dominance not through excellence, but by mastering rapid service. As Bet-David explains:
Why has McDonald’s dominated for years? Not because it has better food for service. It’s because it is faster at delivering your food. Follow its example. Create a committee of savvy people and task them with figuring out how to make a function faster. Take a sheet a paper and list the steps of any function in your business. Examine how you can eliminate one of the steps. Assess which steps you can shorten. Then beta test your revised steps. Make adjustments based on the test. Implement every tool you can to compress time frames.
Four Ways to Accelerate
Bet-David presents four strategies to infuse speed into every facet of your business:
- Functioning Speed: Strengthen your team’s capabilities through targeted training or new hires, elevating their execution pace.
- Processing Speed: Simplify and accelerate key business processes. Amazon’s “one-click” purchase is a prime example of streamlined processing.
- Expansion Speed: Quickly move into new markets or launch products by identifying and overcoming bottlenecks. “What’s the average time it takes you to enter a new market if you’re a retailer? Again, identify your time frame and dissect your steps.”
- Timing Speed: Skillfully choose when to act, leveraging timing for maximum competitive impact. “The question “When?” can work magic. Time your moves correctly, and you can beat competitors who have more resources than you do.”
Seven Steps to Compress Time Frames
- Choose a Process: Clearly define any operational sequence. “From buying a house to ordering a cab to sharing pictures online with friends, there is a process to follow. In fact, one of the great ways to identify a potential business is to find a flawed process that you can improve upon.
- List the Steps: Document every action required.
- Remove a Step: Eliminate unnecessary actions, sparking true disruption. “… See if you can remove a step. How would the process function without that step?”
- Minimize Steps: Streamline and condense remaining actions.
- Beta Test: Trial the new method with select customers/situations.
- Adapt: Fine-tune based on feedback to perfect efficiency.
- Refine: Continuously improve the process for exponential results.
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