BIG Ideas to BIG Results: Remake and Recharge Your Company, Fast

Chapter 8. Productive Speed

“Speed is the new management discipline.”

Get the Train Moving, Now

On any business day in Japan, roughly half the country’s 123 million people hurtle to work at 100 miles per hour on the world’s fastest trains. That’s a distinction envied by other countries, but not necessarily by the 63 million Japanese riding the rails. Efficiently loading the crush of passengers is so imperative to the nation’s 300,000 railway workers that white-gloved “enforcers” rush along every platform, shoving and squeezing laggards aboard packed cars.

Let’s be glad no such enforced mania is needed or even effective for success in business transformation ...