Strategic Speed: Mobilize People, Accelerate Execution

EPILOGUE

The Future of Speed

IF YOU’RE A BABY boomer or a Gen-X’er, you remember business in the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, we were awash in an alphabet soup of new management and technology tools: TQM, CRM, ERP, SFA, LMS—and more.¹ Business process reengineering (BPR) was godfather to all these tools, and all reflected the hope that streamlined processes and better technology would make things happen faster in organizations. It was a hope based on a mechanistic view of business: one that sees the organization fundamentally as a machine that can be designed in advance to deal smoothly and rapidly with any situation it encounters. This era represented “first-generation speed.”

Today, some leaders still focus most of their attention ...