Everyone wants speed. few know how to enable it
As I speak to colleagues and mentors in the @cpg, @food and beverage and @wellness space, once we get through talking about AI, one topic eventually comes up: speed.
Speed for creation - how can we get that new product launched faster, how can we get that video created sooner. Speed for execution: How can we get from idea to execution faster? How can a 12 week project get executed in 4 weeks? Speed for competitive advantage: How can we react quickly to movements in the market by competitors?
As a marketer who has worked across industries - from beauty to wellness to CPG to food and beverage - this is a common theme. More, better, faster. However when I've sat down with partners and clients to unpack what are the barriers to speed, very few marketers feel that they are equipped to skip over the barriers and roadblocks that are placed in their way to enable speed. Everyone wants speed, but so few know how to enable it within their organization.
What are the enablers to speed? From working in Fortune 50 to startups, agency side to client side, here are my observations on the barriers to speed and ways to enable speed in your business.
Risk Tolerance. This is by far the biggest barrier to speed and probably the top reason that Fortune 50 companies are perceived to be slow. The internal tolerance for risk (or lack thereof) drives for certainty in execution and low tolerance of failure. To be more certain, you need to do your testing and learning behind closed doors before it's released to the world. The core rationale is that the marketing investment to launch is high, so certainty needs to be high as well. The dirty secret is that many products that test well internally fail in the market. Startups, who lack the resources to do extensive internal testing, have a higher tolerance for risk and as a result are naturally faster to market. So what do you do about this? Get your organization comfortable with the risk. Highlight the opportunity cost of not taking the risk. Create a "burning platform" internally which focuses on action over risk.
A culture of NO vs. a culture of YES. Like you, I have been in organizations that have been cultures of NO. Whatever great idea people come up with, the default attitude is "prove it to me" and the default answer is NO. Many middle managers feel like their doing their job by asking searing, penetrating questions the answers to which their team may not have. So the team goes back to work, addressing the questions and adding weeks onto the process. In an organization where there is a culture of YES, managers prioritize action over perfection. That doesn't mean these managers don't ask questions. However the questions are less "prove it to me" and more "keep going, but consider this as well". Its amazing to work within an organization with a "culture of yes". You see rank and file employees who are always curious -- taking initiative and ownership knowing their management will support them. Conversely in an organization with a culture of NO, you have employees that punch the clock. You only need to get shut down a couple of times to realize that its just easier to do the obvious and easy things.
Understand the rules before you begin - This is particularly important in highly regulated categories, but it is also key for any business looking to move quickly. Doing your homework to understand where the legal and regulatory guardrails allows you to create a MVP that at the very least won't get shut down by internal legal or the FDA when you're looking to scale. There are times to challenge convention and intentionally break rules that need to be broken to drive disruption in the market. However, to enable speed, it helps to know where the potholes are before the race begins
Make scale work for you, not against you - When I was working with the business school professor and entrepreneur Barry Nalebuff on an overnight oats project at PepsiCo, we quickly ran into the dark side of scale. While we were looking for organic blackberries, the procurement team was telling us there were not enough blackberries in the world to supply our initiative. What? What the procurement person meant is that they didn't have a preferred supplier of organic blackberries and to validate a new supplier would take about a year. A great example of scale working against you. However, what if because of your scale you can talk to partners that smaller companies would only dream of partnering with? At PepsiCo, I was guaranteed to be able to get a meeting with just about anybody - partners like Fair Trade USA, media organizations, NGOs were all eager to talk with us because of the scale we represented. No matter your size, you are always bigger than someone else and can link up to drive programs faster.
Technology reduces friction and gets you a head start - So much ink has been spilt around AI that I hesitate to add it to this discussion but no discussion around speed is complete without talking about how AI and emerging technology can help businesses to move quickly. AI technology can turn a competitive assessment around in seconds not days. AI can scrape Tik Tok and within seconds tell you the top trends in your category. However, many believe the starting point is the finish line. Using AI to scrape trends is not the answer - why? Because your competitors are doing the same thing. AI output is a starting point to inspire, generate ideas and highlight potential vectors that may not have been considered at the outset. It's up to the human in the machine to assess output and generate new ideas or new directions that are novel to the business. Thinking about #2 in the above list (a culture of NO) AI output can help you to structure your business case, and ideally lend you credibility and get you further down the development path than brainpower alone.
In conclusion, for as many companies are advocating and incenting speed, without a considered examination of their current decision structure, they will forever be frustrated with how long things take to get executed. Remove barriers. Change your approach. Get comfortable with risk. There is no free lunch to enable speed in your organization.
