"If the future belongs to those who are fast, know that excuses are slow. Solutions are speed." - Futurist Jim Carroll
Here's what I'm thinking about this Monday morning: the reality check on human nature in the corporate world.
Over the years, hundreds of my keynotes have focused on concepts related to innovation: how to understand it, how to embed it within a team, how to achieve it. That has allowed me the unique opportunity to observe first hands that works and what does not.
And with that came my realization, more than 20 years ago, that above all, successful innovation relies on the ability of a team to achieve speed. Let's call it 'escape velocity' - the ability to get away from the shackles of this current moment and align successfully to the next one. I have warned leadership teams that size no longer guarantees survival; agility does.
That message has worked its way into my written work. If you look back at the thousands of blog posts I’ve written since 2002, a permanent thread ties them all together: velocity. I I even codified this philosophy into the title of my book, The Future Belongs to Those Who Are Fast.
With this, I also know that there is a a dark, slow-moving twin to corporate speed: people who seem to be in the business of manufacturing excuses.
Excuses won't get you anywhere. Action does. And in that context, speed matters.
And coming up with excuses for moving slowly is at the core of your organization, you've got a big problem. If your day-to-day work consists of explaining inaction, you aren't innovating successfully. You are manufacturing failure. And in that reality, you need to think about tipping the scales: the number of excuses you manufacture should never exceed the solutions you find.
When every trend impacting you is moving at exponential speed, waiting for 100% clarity isn't prudent. It's a choice to fail.. True innovators don't have time to engineer an airtight alibi for why a project didn't launch.
They are too busy running low-stakes experiments and crashing through boundaries to try to chase success.
Be that person!
If Jim Carroll was to narrow down the primary theme for most of the corporate keynotes he has done through the years, it would be around the issue of speed and moving fast.