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Sometimes, it is relatively easy to realize that you are not fast enough.
But how to accelerate?
This is a technical article about Speed Up.
The following article is reprinted from the WeChat public account: Drunk Startup (ID: drunkstartup)
Speed as a Habit
Author: Dave Girouard
Translation: Dai Cui
Original link: http://firstround.com/review/speed-as-a-habit/
The author of this article, Dave Girouard, is the CEO of Upstart, a personal finance company, and the former president of Google Enterprise Applications, known for building the Google Enterprise Applications division worth over $1 billion. In this article, he shares some tips on making speed a fundamental principle of the company.
I have always believed that speed is the ultimate weapon for a business. In any market, the fastest company will always win, given all other conditions are equal. Speed is a typical trait that a leader should possess—perhaps sometimes the only trait.
In the tech industry, speed is often seen as a factor in product development, which is why Facebook has the slogan “Move fast and break things” and why there is recognition of minimum viable products (MVP) and agile development. Most people agree that speed is the key to product success.
However, what people do not realize is that speed is also crucial for other parts of the business, not just the product. Google is fast, General Motors is slow, startups are fast, and large companies are slow. Undoubtedly, being fast is good, but few articles discuss how to cultivate departments and employees to make “speed” a prominent competitive advantage for the company.
I believe that speed, like maintaining exercise and a healthy diet, can be a habit.
By continuously and proactively cultivating these good habits, we as founders, management, and employees can become faster and more efficient builders of companies. Moreover, when enough members of an organization demonstrate these habits and reinforce, supplement, and enhance them, the speed of the department itself will also improve.
This is how category killers are born.
Now, let’s break down the components of speed. Think carefully, all business activities can actually be summarized into two simple things: making decisions and executing decisions. Your success depends on your ability to master speed in both.
Making Decisions
A good plan executed immediately is better than a perfect plan executed next week.
This is a quote from General George Patton, and I completely agree. Do you remember the last time someone said in a meeting, “We must make a decision before we leave the room”? How did that feel?
The time wasted in repetitive decision-making processes in various companies is simply maddening. Most importantly, remember: when to make a decision is much more important than what that decision is.
If you can develop the habit of considering how much time and energy a decision will take, who needs to provide input, and when a conclusion can be reached before making a decision, then you have developed the first habit of increasing speed.
This is not to say that all decisions need to be made hastily. Some relatively complex or important decisions may indeed require gathering more information first; some decisions cannot be easily overturned, and some mistakes can have devastating consequences. Most importantly, some decisions do not need to be made immediately because they do not affect the speed of “downstream” processes.
Deciding when to make a decision from the outset is a very powerful method to enhance the speed of everything.
During my years at Google, Eric Schmidt always used this method for decision-making—perhaps he didn’t even think about it deliberately. Because founders Larry and Sergey were always very opinionated leaders, involved in every major decision, Eric understood that he could not unilaterally make significant decisions. This could have delayed many things, but Eric ensured that every decision was made within a specific timeframe—a very practical and definite time. He developed this habit and allowed Google to change accordingly.
Now at Upstart, we are a much smaller company, but we still have to make several important decisions every day. We are deeply driven by the belief that making decisions quickly is always better than making them slowly, and not making a decision is the worst. Every day, every hour, we think about how important each decision is and how much time it deserves. Some decisions deserve several days of discussion and analysis, but the vast majority are worth at most 10 minutes.
It is crucial to be aware of whether a decision is reversible, fatal, or non-fatal. Only a very few decisions are truly irreversible.
It is important to note that increasing speed does not require a leader to make all decisions from the top down. The art of good decision-making is to gather information and perspectives from the team and then make the final decision, indicating that all viewpoints have been considered. As my career has progressed, I have shifted from directly telling people I have the right answer to controlling and guiding discussions to reach a final conclusion. This cannot simply be called reaching a consensus—you do not want consensus to bind you—but the information provided by others can help you make the right decision faster and gain the team’s buy-in.
This does not support impulsive decision-making. Sometimes I may be too “pedal to the metal,” and occasionally my co-founder Anna will say, “This is a significant decision; even though we think we know what to do, let’s think about it for another 24 hours.” Her wisdom has saved us many times.
Knowing when to end the debate and make a decision is an art. When both sides have good arguments and strong emotions, many leaders are reluctant to make a call. We instinctively want the team to arrive at the right decision themselves. But I find that when people hear you take the baton and are willing to take full responsibility for a decision, they always breathe a sigh of relief. You do not need to use “CEO privilege”—that is, making the final decision—every day. In fact, as long as you use it judiciously, you will make employees more comfortable, and by pulling the trigger, reasonably explaining your choice, and sticking to it, you can gain more trust.
In fact, measuring the comfort level of the team is a good way to help you judge whether you are fast enough.
If people feel a slight discomfort and pressure, it proves that your speed is fast enough. But if you are going too fast, you can also see it on people’s faces, and it is equally important to observe this.
When I was at Google, Larry Page was very good at pushing for quick decisions to the point where people were always worried that the team would rush off a cliff. Without crossing the line of discomfort, he would push for decisions as much as possible. He instinctively asked, “Why not? Why can’t we be a little faster?” and then observed whether people would scream. He really united everyone around the concept that “unless it is a matter of life and death, a quick decision is always better.”
Executing Decisions
Many people spend a lot of time optimizing their productivity systems and to-do lists. However, executing a plan as quickly as possible within a team or organization is a completely different concept. Below is how I learned to execute forcefully.
Questioning Execution Time
The sheer number of plans and actions generated in meetings without specified deadlines often shocks me. Even when deadlines are set, they are often based on unreliable gut estimates.Completion dates and times often resemble the concept of the sun rising and setting in tribal times, with “tomorrow” often becoming the default answer.
This is not to say that everything needs to be completed immediately. However, for important matters, questioning completion dates is often useful; all you have to do is ask the simplest question: “Why can’t this be done faster?” A skilled, trustworthy, and habitual way of asking this will profoundly impact your organization’s speed.
This is definitely a strategy that should start with individual employees—preferably those in higher positions who can influence the behavior of others. As a leader, you want to turn “what I want to do” into “what we want to do.” This is how ideas are deeply embedded in people’s minds. I have seen too many people who never ask when things can be delivered, always assuming that it will happen immediately, which rarely occurs. I have also seen creativity thrown out the window because a completion deadline was not locked in time.
You do not have to be too aggressive; just keep telling others that today is better than tomorrow, and doing it now is better than doing it in six hours.
My old friend Sabih Khan has a funny story. At the time, he was in the operations department at Apple, and I was there as a product manager. In 2008, he had a meeting with Tim Cook to discuss the production chaos in China. Tim said, “This is terrible; we should send someone over.” After another thirty minutes, the topic shifted to something else, and suddenly Tim looked at Sabih and said, “Why are you still here?” Sabih immediately walked out of the meeting room, drove to San Francisco airport, and boarded the next flight to China without even changing his clothes. And you know, the problem was quickly resolved.
The candle is always burning. You need to exercise leadership to feel and instill that sense of urgency in every discussion.
Identifying and Removing Dependencies
Just as important as setting deadlines, you need to eliminate all dependencies related to an action.This point may seem obvious; key projects that determine the success or failure of tasks must be handled collaboratively by the team to accelerate all subsequent activities. Things that can be handled later must be sidelined. Ultimately, when your team can complete a life-and-death task by the deadline, they should not be dawdling on non-critical tasks.
This largely means ensuring that people are not waiting for each other to take the next step.Untrained individuals often strangely assume that things are linear—e.g., waiting for X, Y, and Z to be completed before you do that thing, and then I will do this. It is not like that; what you need is for people to work in parallel.
Many dependencies that people think exist are merely their own assumptions.
How do you turn linear dependencies into parallel actions? As a CEO, I intervene at different nodes in the process and aggressively accelerate things. For example, if we need to make a statement and time is tight, I might directly write that blog post myself. It’s not that my team can’t do it; I just know that because I am always very picky about content, it will be faster if I do it. As a leader, you have the responsibility to identify these dependencies and non-dependencies and take action based on the importance and deadlines of the tasks.
Every day, I will say in meetings, “We do not need to wait for other conditions; we can start doing this now.” This idea is quite common; people just need to say it out loud more often.
Eliminating Cognitive Load
Do you remember the experience of downloading songs on iTunes? If you wanted to buy an entire album at once, the speed was excruciatingly slow. You had to wait for one song to finish downloading before the others could speed up. Projects can be similar; sometimes a project is so complex that it feels like you are trying to download six albums at once, and everything else is stalled.
I can’t count how many meetings we had at Google discussing the Google ID issues for enterprise accounts and regular users. We started a project to solve this problem, but it was so complex that the first 30 minutes of every meeting were spent reiterating what happened in the last meeting. This cognitive load was simply maddening.
From this, I realized that if you can solve the major issues in a project early on, the management cost of the remaining parts decreases by 90%. Always be on the lookout for such opportunities.
Often, the complexity is added by small details in the project. For example, our business at Upstart needs to comply with many regulations, and we could hardly do anything until we confirmed whether we could obtain legal permission, so discussions about the legality of everything often consumed a lot of time. Later we thought, why not just let our lawyers determine what we can do and what is problematic? This simple way of looking at issues greatly reduced the cognitive load of each of our decisions.
If you can identify, pinpoint, and solve the most complex parts of the puzzle, everyone can breathe a little easier. One situation I often encounter—both at Google and elsewhere—is that people always wonder how the founders or CEO will view each step of the plan—so go ask them for their opinions, don’t wait until later to find out it was a waste of effort. What the founders think is a typical cognitive burden.
Using Competition Wisely
Talking about competition is a good way to increase urgency. But you have to be careful. As a leader, your role is to judge whether your team is moving at full speed due to anxiety or if they are not pushing hard enough. Depending on the answer, competition can be a beneficial tool in different ways.
At Upstart, we always emphasize that when we are working hard on something, our competitors may be working just as hard on things we don’t even know about. So we need to stay vigilant. Many people say you should ignore competition, but acknowledging competition will motivate you to set your pace in the market.
You can set the pace of the market yourself or be the one who is chasing. The one who takes the first step the fastest will always force everyone else to react.
When we launched Google Apps, we were competing with Microsoft Office, which had a monopolistic dominance. We thought about what we could do differently and better, and our simple pricing mechanism was one of them. Instead of the long, convoluted 20-page quote Microsoft would throw at you—we set a uniform price of $50 per employee per year. We didn’t get bogged down in whether it should be $45, $50, or $55—we made the decision in less than half an hour. We just wanted to tell everyone, “We may not be free, but we will be the easiest decision you make.” This is how we set the market standard and promoted it heavily, forcing others to respond.
Getting Others to Support Your Decisions
In the tech field, almost nothing can be accomplished in isolation. Basically, once you make a decision, you need to persuade others that you are right and get them to prioritize your needs over their other tasks.
To influence a decision, you must first realize that you are dealing with other people. Even if you need to gain the support of a vendor or another company, it ultimately comes down to an individual. From this perspective, it is very important to understand who that person is, what their job is, how their success is measured, what they care about, and all the other things they consider important. Then ask yourself, “How can I help them get what they want while also getting my needs met?”
I have seen this achieved by appealing to others’ self-esteem. Perhaps you tell them you have worked with their competitors, who are doing things quickly, so they will do it faster. I have also seen it achieved through personal integrity and honesty. You might say, “We are really betting on this, so we really need you to step up your game.”
Regardless of the approach, you should support your argument with logic. You should patiently understand what is happening. I habitually ask many questions, such as “Can you help me understand why some things take so long? Is there anything we can do to help things move along faster?” Always try to understand the core of the actions they are taking and the time they are investing in them. If useful, remember to praise them in front of their boss.
I strongly recommend the above methods rather than escalating issues to their manager or using competition to pressure them in a blunt manner, which is completely unhelpful and they are likely to stop helping you.
How can you make others look good? How can solving your problem also become a victory for them within their own company?
All of this ultimately boils down to making things progress as quickly and smoothly as possible. When you feel things are slowing down, you need to keep asking questions. Asking questions is the best weapon against inertia.
To keep things running at Upstart, I quickly ask many very difficult questions, most of which are time-related. I know we are executing well and generally doing the right things at the right time, but I often question why some things take so long. Are we working as efficiently as we can?
Too many people think speed is the enemy of quality. To some extent, they are right—you cannot rush innovation, and sometimes genius needs time and freedom to shine. But in my personal experience, this situation is very rare. It is not easy to weigh doing things quickly against doing them well. Don’t let yourself or your organization use this as a shield or excuse to lose momentum. Once you do, you lose your competitive edge.