Hacking Marketing

9From Big Waterfalls to Small Sprints

To acclimate ourselves to the speed of a digital world, we must accelerate the tempo at which marketing operates. Seems obvious, right?

But the question is how we accelerate. The answer is not, simply, to have everyone try to work twice as hard. It's certainly not about coming into the office earlier, staying later, or giving up weekends and holidays. Companies have tried that approach, with sticks and carrots. Although it might provide a short burst of productivity, things eventually disintegrate. People get exhausted. And when they're exhausted, they do poor work, make bad decisions, get cranky, and then seek to escape the meat grinder. It ends up being more destructive than helpful.

We need a more sustainable solution. Because ideally, we don't just want to accelerate our tempo. We also want our teams to do better work, make better decisions, be happier in their jobs, and feel a genuine love for the organization that they're a part of.

Is that too much to hope for? Surprisingly, it doesn't have to be.

The answer is in recognizing that it's not the speed of activities individuals perform that is our bottleneck. If everyone in your company were suddenly able to type twice as fast, that wouldn't double your responsiveness in the market. Unless you're a transcription service, I doubt it would have much of an impact at all.

Our challenges with speed are at a higher level.

What we really need to accelerate is our cadence of management—how we ...