Competing Against Time Quotes

“In general, the shorter the process cycle time, the more a chain can let its production schedules be driven by actual demand, in this case, the final assembly schedule. The more making-to-order the chain can do and still meet lead time, the shorter the overall chain cycle time.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“To compress a whole chain’s cycle time, companies have to coordinate in new ways. The system’s total time problem will not be solved by each company working independently to compress its own cycle. There are also too many reasons why a company won’t spontaneously make the changes needed to help the whole cycle. Actions have to be taken together by pairs or groups of companies.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“It is now more important than ever for a company to think of itself as one player in an interdependent chain of companies competing against other chains for the ultimate customer at the end.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“There is one other condition for continuous improvement, and that is growth of the business. Market share is nice and in many businesses it’s a major advantage, but growth is essential. Vital organizations grow regardless of the industry’s growth rate. Growth forces you to get new customers and new problems. Growth makes your people change the way they spend their day. Growth makes your company create new segments or cross existing boundaries to encounter new competitors. The longer you grow, the longer you can put off the day when your business is “mature” and your organization is “settled.” If that day comes, you have a real management problem on your hands.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“Shorten the economic lives of equipment. Many companies bias their purchases toward longer-lived equipment, citing lower depreciation costs. But shorter-lived equipment may force more frequent process reviews among key departments, opening opportunities for improvement.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“The foregoing prescription for becoming a time-based competitor—radical vision, breakthrough teams, with top management involved and leading the way—is the jump-start. A large organization at any given time is invested in a way of doing business that carries with it a set of expectations and implied standards for what is good. The slower the industry rate of change, the more is invested. Even successful organizations experience inertia. The companies that over a period of years dramatically compress time start by overcoming inertia: They set new goals, discard old routines, and celebrate new approaches that work better. Leaders get this done by mobilizing the best people in their organization. This is the jump-start, and it is always a radical, stressful period. It is also eventually highly satisfying.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“In this way, the change process is neither top down nor bottom up, but really driven from the middle and coordinated at the top by those who settled on the vision.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“Breakthrough teams, or something comparable, are especially useful for making organizationally complex changes, where analysis should precede action. Analysis is needed because the solution isn’t obvious and different parts of the company have to be involved. These teams are the backbone of a company’s move toward time compression and can be mobilized quickly. Teams can shape recommendations early and draw reaction. Once a solution takes shape, it can be refined during implementation. Breakthrough teams lose effectiveness if they stand too long.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“The steering group that charters and integrates the breakthroughs becomes the principal orchestrator of the change. The number of teams is important. Setting up too many teams will fragment the problem and fail to confront the real issues of organizational complexity and distance. Too few teams will overwhelm each team with an impossible charter. Breakthrough teams should be set up to succeed.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“Experience suggests that these teams must be given radical goals, like collapsing time in half. Otherwise, assumptions aren’t challenged. The whole premise is using bottlenecks, breakdowns, and unmet customer needs as opportunities to learn. The teams use a variety of techniques—root-cause analysis, scenario building, pursuing conflict between two people until the real problem crystalizes, and old-fashioned imagination. Between regular meetings, research into technical or other problems is done. There are no formal reports to the team members’ superiors. The teams report to a senior steering group that is responsible for all the breakthrough teams operating. This steering group is responsible for managing change under the time-based vision that the management team has decided to pursue.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“Pilots work best when demonstration is the right first step and when a local manager already has a pretty good broad idea of the change he or she wants and knows it can get done if not exactly how.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“Time is relatively straightforward to measure inside a company once management begins to focus on it. Time is captured explicitly in measures of elapsed time—lead time, cycle time, and so on—and implicitly in metrics normally used in engineering and finance—machine uptime, product yield, inventory turnover, and the like. When all these time-related measures are brought together with maps showing the organization’s main flows and interaction patterns, a powerful picture of the company’s problems and opportunities comes into view.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“A good summary measure of time compression is a simple cumulative elapsed time bar. Just lay out a bar from left to right, its length representing a total cycle, say, for a new-product test program that took two months. Each day is one slice of the bar. Color in each slice depending on whether value was added that day, with green for value and white for delays, queues, rework, and other avoidable downtime. Results usually show a little green in an essentially white bar.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“The results were astonishing. No one station had noticeably poor uptime or yield, but each had some small problems. Neither uptime nor yield was at 100 percent for any station. This mapping and measurement of the process showed that if each station’s yield and uptime were just 1 percent better than current performance, they would raise the effective capacity of the whole process by more than one-third. (Remember the 1 percent improvement is compounded 38—19 × 2—times.) In other words, the way to get higher and more flexible capacity was to control the existing process more rigorously. This would reduce the cycle time—increase throughput—for existing product volume so that there would be time to run additional products. It would also help reduce the cost of variety, because the faster the cycle time, the sooner a new product variant could be set up and run through the process and shipped to a customer.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“It is sometimes easier to study competitors than your own company because it’s easier to be objective. But it’s important not to assume that in those areas where information can’t be found, competitors are just like you. In fact, it’s more useful to assume they aren’t and force yourself to imagine how they might approach this or that differently.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“Competitive analysis shouldn’t aim to snap a picture of “the answer,” rather it should build a picture around common themes but allow for changing parts. For example, Toyota is now allowing more option-package flexibility as it advances its data systems. But the core competitive story remains the same. By coming up with new products faster, it puts competitors on the marketing defensive.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“The purpose of benchmarking is to discover and confirm paradigms, not necessarily to set your own performance targets. The benchmarked company’s level of performance may be inappropriately low or alternatively may be well past your foreseeable level of capability. What matters is to get outside your company’s own assumptions and habits to see how system-wide time compression really works.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“Several realities have become clear in the course of exploring complex work cycles inside large companies. First, rarely do managers know the interaction map of the company. They know the organization chart and the critical path of projects, especially review dates. In other words, they know how long it takes and who’s involved, but they don’t know how to approach fixing”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“Time-based competitors know the value of time in their businesses, just as Henry Ford knew it in 1921. They know that as they increase their abilities to give their customers what they want faster than their competitors can, their profitability grows. The managements of these companies know that when their responsiveness exceeds that of their competitors, they can charge consistently higher prices, their costs to provide value and to serve their customers are reduced, the costs of their product development resources decrease, and as a result of these advantages, the productivity of their assets improves.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“However, more intriguing than either the dramatic improvements in labor or in net asset productivity was the fact that as these companies became more productive they could also expand the variety of the product line they offered their customers. They grew by giving their customers more choice. Variety expansion is far more important to growth than is the cutting of price facilitated by improved labor and net asset productivity. After prices are cut, customers have little more to look for, while expanding choice enables companies to become increasingly relevant to their customers. On average, these companies expanded their product lines by 30 to 270 percent.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“Before the management of the company just described could become fast innovators, they had to develop and embrace a new philosophy of organizing around time. The new philosophy is embedded in these eleven key principles: Time is the key performance variable to be managed to attain improved cost and quality. Time benchmarks are set by the performance of competitors and, if faster, by what is technologically possible. The support functions necessary to advance the development process are actively managed to be “invisible.” Their need is to be anticipated; they are to be invested in and kept up-to-date. They are never to be allowed to slow the development process. Each program is to be managed and executed by a small, dedicated, decision-empowered, and experienced team. Team members have common goals and are measured and evaluated as part of a team. The development programs are to have four steps, and the company will organize itself around these steps: Planning and preparation Product definition Design development Manufacturing ramp-up Product improvement The objective of planning and preparation is to avoid having to invent in the middle of the development process—make unknowns be knowns. After definition, the product specification is frozen. The definition is committed to and not allowed to be changed. The improvement phase is to be used for costs and feature enhancements. Functional expertise resides in the development program. Manufacturing and design resources are full-time participants in the definition team. Manufacturing resources are full time participants in the design team. Team members are collocated. Senior management reviews are few. The role of senior management is to ensure that the program teams have the appropriate resources, incentives and environment to execute their tasks quickly. New programs are generated continuously, at regular market-driven intervals, and incorporate more incremental advances and fewer “great leaps forward.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“The organizations of fast innovators are structured for ease of coordination and speed of execution. Slow innovators are structured for functional control, cost efficiency, and risk avoidance, a structure that results in a slow and cumbersome development process. With the functional organization come multiple hand-offs that consume time, cause errors to occur and diminish overall accountability. Coordination and control can only be accomplished through elaborate review processes and documentation requirements. Quality seems to decline, not improve. Functions have their firm budgets and manage themselves to their budgets even at the expense of time. To help ensure that budgets are met, performance targets are conservative. Senior management actively participates in program decisions, and, because of their very full schedules, further slow the decision-making processes of the company.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“More interesting than the fact that the Japanese company was a faster innovator than its Western affiliate was where it achieved its speed advantage. The Japanese did not score a significant advantage in any one step of the development and introduction cycle—design concept, design engineering, design review, detail design, field test, prototype manufacture, or first production. Instead, with the exception of the design review step, the Japanese company outperforms its Western affiliate a half-step every step of the way. Cumulatively, the advantage becomes significant.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“Timely execution is very demanding. The process of bringing an innovation to market is complex and harbors many unknowns. An innovation must often successfully defeat a thousand enemies—inside as well as outside of the enterprise—to become a reality. Once the innovation is in the market, continued effective execution is critical. The first company to move with the strongest innovation often reaps the greatest reward. But to retain the advantage, the innovator must prevail with the second innovation as well as with the third. Failure to accomplish this means risking all.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“Although the challenge to innovation is in originating new ideas, time is at the core of an innovation’s success. Certainly, there cannot be innovation without new ideas. But innovation means change, and change is measured by time. The magnitude of change is measured as innovations per unit of time. Timely execution is critical to successful innovation and to high rates of change. Thus, it is timely execution as much as ideas that is the challenge to innovation.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“The principal thrust of management has been to invest in technology and to cut price to achieve account penetration. Very little effort was being expended in strengthening the field service responsiveness of the company. But the customers want service more than technology and low prices!”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“Being responsive to the needs of customers pays in four ways: Customers are more loyal to suppliers who are consistently responsive to their needs. Customers will pay a premium over the typical price to a responsive supplier. Customers will buy more goods and services from a responsive supplier. The supplier becomes strategically advantaged when it secures the demanding customer.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“Time as a source of competitive advantage is applicable whenever customers have to wait to receive the value they have decided they want. This leads to new ways of thinking about business. A business is a collection of systems for providing value to customers. The company’s resources should be organized to support the value-adding process.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“Across a spectrum of businesses, the amount of time required to execute a service or an order, manufacture and deliver a product is far less than the actual time the service or product spends in the value-delivery system. For example, a manufacturer of heavy vehicles takes 45 days to prepare an order for assembly, but only 16 hours to assemble each vehicle. The vehicle is actually receiving value for less than 1 percent of the time it spends in the system.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar

“The refocusing of attention from cost to time is enabling the early innovators to become time-based competitors who can, literally, run circles around their slower competition. Time-based competitors are offering greater varieties of products at lower costs and in less time than their more pedestrian competitors.”
― George Stalk Jr., Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar