Chasing the Rabbit: Official Blog by Author Steven Spear

Excerpt: What is  hard about running a marathon?  Not the 26.2 miles itself but the discipline over six months before. Train 4 to 5 times a week, intently pushing the boundaries of endurance, speed, and strength, and you’ll finish, and with a good time. Don’t and fortitude will be insufficient on race day.

So too with organizations needing to master high velocity competition, trying to generate unmatchable stretches of high speed innovation and invention.  Tightly compress frequent learning cycles and you’ll get better, faster to do much more with much less.  Delay, dawdle, and deliberate in lieu of doing dynamically, and you’ll feel like you’re working hard, but actually get nowhere.

Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition opens with our annual ritual–watching each year’s Boston Marathon, three miles from the finish.  The crowd’s anticipation is rewarded when the first runner glides by, fast but seemingly effortless while his seemingly harder working rivals are in pursuit but really racing for second.  That becomes the metaphor for the book: In many contests, it is not a matter of controlling a static position that matters, but hitting milestones in front of the field and as they struggle to catch up, moving onto the next.

The marathon offers another metaphor bull’s-eye appropriate for succeeding in hyper competitive markets, especially in challenging times.  Ask someone who has completed a marathon what the hardest part was, and often the answer is not the race itself.  The real challenge is training four to five times a week for 25 to 30 weeks, constantly pushing the boundaries on distance, speed, and strength.  Do that hard work week in and week out, and you’re nearly certain of finishing.  Do it with particular conviction and you are likely to finish and with a fast time.

The alternatives are not viable.  Don’t start training and you’ll never get fit.  Start but skip training sessions and dilute the intensity of those that remain, and you’ll never generate steady progress.  It will be constant plateau instead.

So too for those companies needing to accelerate, to develop and deploy the capabilities that foster relentless improvement, innovation, and invention.

Some recognize that survival now and success down the road depend on discovering what markets need, designing products and services to meet those needs, and developing and operating systems that will deliver those items faster, more agilely, and with more certainty than anyone else.  To learn the skills to do so means getting into the thick of things, in the field with customers, hammering out prototypes and beta tests in the lab and studio, and engaging production systems with relentless urgency.

They’ll get it.  Not so those organizations that decompress the practice/learning cycles.  They dabble, they dawdle, but they never have the sustained investment of time and energy by which true learning and mastery will be acquired.

Want to predict how well a marathoner wanna-be will do on race day?  Watch them prepare: How many runs done, how many miles recorded, how much progress made?  That’s the great predictor.  Likewise with organizations espousing a desire to be process excellent, operationally great.  Watch them too.  How many new things  tried?  How many discoveries made?  How much experiential testing and training occurred?  How many lessons learned locally and applied systemically.

Great inventor and business person Thomas Edison is to have said that most people never recognize opportunity because it comes dressed in coveralls, is covered in dirt and grease, and is disguised as hard work.

Related posts:

1. BusinessWeek.com Video: High Velocity Lessons in an Economic Downturn
2. The Basic Science of High Velocity Systems: Principles for generating and sustaining improvement and innovation
3. Innovation and Workforce Engagement in a High-Velocity World
4. Outlearning the Competition to Out Race the Competition
5. High velocity innovation and food safety…