How companies can accelerate transformation

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In a recent presentation to their founders on adapting to today's market environment, the Sequoia team quoted Charles Darwin: "It's not the strongest surviving species, nor the smartest , but the one that best adapts to change.” The folks at Sequoia have called it "survival of the fastest", going so far as to name "speed" one of the "greatest business strategies".

While many tend to agree with this advice, the “go faster” mentality specifically in terms of getting work done isn’t always particularly helpful. Many venture-backed companies today find themselves in a race against time. Investors ultimately want to see a return, which usually means an IPO or an acquisition. Between IPO volume down 46% year-over-year, the IPO market not expecting to pick up anytime soon, and M&A activity down 20% and in a downturn, leaders must figure out how to keep the lights on before the money runs out.

Addressing complexity, inefficiency, indecisiveness

In such a climate, the real question becomes: what exactly should business leaders do faster?

The answer is deceptively simple: Business as a whole needs to change faster.

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For venture-backed companies and companies operating in highly competitive and volatile markets, rapid scaling is a critical business capability, and if your business is adaptable and has the ability to change as a whole, it will gain in efficiency. To support this, leaders must structure their businesses around rapid change. Frankly, this is the only way to make speed a business strategy.

Architecting the business for speed, and therefore accelerating any transformation, involves tackling three major roadblocks: complexity, inefficiency, and indecisiveness. Complexity is managed with a focus on simplifying the customer and employee experience. Inefficiencies are fixed by optimizing the technology you use. Indecision is overcome by providing actionable information to the people who need it. Here's how.

Simplify the customer experience

Over the past decade, startups and scale-ups have focused on growth, especially in an era of "capital glut". However, we have now entered an era where the technology financial market is essentially frozen. As a result, one of the changes that companies must manage is a shift towards profitability.

Cost reduction is a lever for improving profitability. Acquiring and retaining more customers is another. Creating a customer-centric enterprise architecture means rethinking how companies invest in technology. Specifically, it means shifting the traditional IT focus. While a mainstream approach sees IT investing primarily in existing product infrastructure and capabilities, an approach focused on accelerating change invests significantly more in developing new capabilities.

When customer needs change, as they do now, companies need to react quickly. This cannot be done if you have to reorganize the business to meet new demand...