It doesn't even take a second: the arm is airborne, pistol
in hand, gunshot a memory. If the gunslinger of the Old West
didn't have a fast draw, he was dead. Today, several thousand
competitors pay tribute to those men of speed by joining the World
Fast Draw Association (WFDA), a club whose members compete in
events held around the globe. Every year, shootists fire at a
target to see who has the quickest trigger finger. "Some of
the fastest draws take only a quarter of a second," observes
Howard Darby, one of the wfda's ranking members. "A
typical fast draw is just one-tenth of a second slower."
Nobody's timed the slowest draw. Nobody cares.
The world moves fast--and it's getting faster. E-mail.
E-commerce. E-everything. The world moves so fast, in fact,
it's enough to make you fall fast asleep from exhaustion.
But don't! You don't have the time, according to Kelsey
Biggers, executive vice president of Micro Modeling Associates, a
technological consulting firm in New York City. "Industries
are changing so quickly," he says, that--at least in terms of
keeping up with technology--companies "need to accomplish in
90 days what traditionally took a year. The landscape is changing
so quickly that if you tried to stick to your five-year plan,
you'd be obsolete in six months."
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"Yes, the world of business has really sped up,"
agrees Jeff Shuman, the director of entrepreneurial studies at
Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts, "but one of the
challenges entrepreneurs have to watch out for is not to get
trapped operating at a speed of business that's out of sync
with the natural rhythm of their particular company." This is
the premise of Shuman's recent book, co-written with David
Rottenberg, The Rhythm of Business: The Key to Building and
Running Successful Companies (Butterworth-Heinemann).
"Speed for speed's sake is a problem, if you get stuck
in that trap," says Shuman. "You've got to be very
careful that you're dealing with the right pace [for] your
business--as opposed to some arbitrary, outside mandate to move
quickly."
A nice sentiment, but even Shuman concedes you'll need to
move quickly if your customers demand you do so. Then the speed of
business isn't so arbitrary, and you'd better rev up the
Millennium Falcon--without crashing. "The reality,"
Shuman says, "is that customers are setting faster
beats."
Geoff Williams is a freelance writer and a features reporter
for The Cincinnati Post. He can fire off a water pistol in
under a minute.
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