”If things seem under control, you are just not going fast enough.”
— Mario Andretti“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.”
— General George Patton
Steve Blank‘s CEO friend was trying to run an agile tech startup but found himself still making slow, thorough, deliberate decisions like an engineer, so Steve offered him some advice on speed and tempo:
The heuristic I gave my friend was to think of decisions of having two states: those that are reversible and those that are irreversible. An example of a reversible decision could be adding a product feature, a new algorithm in the code, targeting a specific set of customers, etc. If the decision was a bad call you can unwind it in a reasonable period of time. An irreversible decision is firing an employee, launching your product, a five-year lease for an expensive new building, etc. These are usually difficult or impossible to reverse.My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left his office or before a meeting ended. In a startup it doesn’t matter if you’re 100% right 100% of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based feedback loop (i.e. Customer Development) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That’s why startups are agile. By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked.
Tempo = Speed Consistently Over Time
Once you learn how to make decisions quickly you’re not done. Startups that are agile have mastered one other trick — and that’s Tempo — the ability to make quick decisions consistently over extended periods of time. Not just for the CEO or the exec staff, but for the entire company. For a startup Speed and Tempo need to be an integral part of your corporate DNA.