Speed Doesn't Kill - It Drives Success

During my twenty seven years in business development, the imperative to work at a reasonably rapid pace was constantly going through my mind. I had read this in a guidance from my mentor, and not only did it stick, it proved to be essential to my long term success.

It goes without saying that we each need to develop our own pace that is comfortable and effective for us. That said, I am thoroughly convinced that had I missed this one piece of advice I would have produced results significantly below those which I ultimately achieved.

So what does a "reasonably rapid" pace mean in terms of day to day affairs in one's career ? Common sense dictates that what is reasonably rapid for one person is just coasting for another. This is where wisdom comes in insofar as being able to hit the mark, to be able to work in that rhythm that is our own individual sweet spot, or perhaps just on the upper edge of it.

The type of business I was involved with was security technology and automation for commercial office buildings which demanded a high degree of accuracy in the proposals that, in some cases, took as much as the better part of a month to prepare. One of my colleagues accurately described this painstaking process as "breaking rocks" as in what someone does when, say 50 years ago, they were sentenced to some number of years of "hard labor". It was a humorous analogy. It also happened to be accurate.

Some weeks the proposals that were in the cue to be written couldn't be completed even if I worked full time both Saturday and Sunday. It was at these times that being able to work rapidly and also efficiently paid huge dividends. It is said that "necessity is the mother of invention". Necessity compelled me to eventually develop a system of converting the voluminous amounts of text into a grid which was done in Excel and cut the amount of time it took to write a proposal by more than seventy five percent. A proposal that had preveously taken over eight hours to write could be done in the new method in two hours !

I was not sure how the people who had to build what I had proposed would like this new method.
So when the company's quality control manager commented that he liked it far better than the old text heavy documentation I knew I had developed a tool that would give me an almost unfair advantage in the horse race that was a field of approximately eighty people who held the same position as I did around the world. It wasn't that I had placed a patent on what I had developed. It was just the nature of the egos of people in business development - they felt they would be perceived as playing "follow the leader" if they adapted what I had devised.

At the end of the day, it was my desire to win that drove my speed and efficiency. My mentor stated in his speeches regularly that the life philosophy we embraced concerned itself with victory or defeat, not a mean spirited law of the jungle sort of victory, but one in which we win and do our best to set an example so that everyone can win.