Business at the speed

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’BUSINESS AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT’ –THE ROLE OF TIME AND SPEED ON BUSINESS STRATEGY

The article focuses on the importance ofthe dimension of time and speed in the world of competitive strategy.
In today’s global village, businesses struggle with competitors in the industry to achieve sustainable competitive advantages through the creation of economies of scale and/or economies of scope but also to achieve economy of time. In some industries this is one of the key success points for leadership in the competition. Thearticle describes the trends in the area of the impact of time and speed on the world of strategy and presents the main parameters that influence the speed of the implementation of the strategic processes by companies.
Keywords: Business Strategy, Speed, Time, Time-Based Competition.

Business strategy is directly related to time and speed.
Expressions such as time-based strategy, time-basedorganization, just in time, response time, and so on have become an inseparable part of the terms of the world of business strategy.
In such a dynamic business world, business management obligates the rapid execution of strategic decisions. For example, Andrew Grove, the legendary CEO
of the INTEL Corporation said, “Speed has become everything in the world of business” (Fortune, 1992) or JeffBezos, the founder of Amazon.com, calls it, “business at the speed of thought” (Spector, 2008). We act in a world that does not rest for a moment and more than a few companies today operate without stop ‘around the clock’ – 24/7 – every year in a great number of time
regions around the globe.
This means that companies needs to make more decisions in a shorter period of time, at a higher level ofuncertainty or lack of information, and at a more aggressive level of competition, which immediately punishes every delay in the schedule. For example, in the field of fashion a delay of few weeks in a new line of
products reaching the market is critical(Gilbert, 1993), and in the airplane manufacture industry a delay of few months can cause a lot of damage as we saw when the European airplanemanufacturer Airbus, pospone few times its new superjumbo A-380 launch date. That caused a crisis that eventually led to the resigns of Gustav Humbert, the President and CEO of Airbus (Airbus press release, 2 July 2006), to the payment of high penalties to the aviation companies that had ordered the plane due the delay in the delivery date, and eventually to the cancellation of orders and the transferof clients to its main competitor, the American Boeing company.
Time can be expressed in a variety of ways in the company day-to-day life like: cycle time, time to market, new product development time, time elapsed between
order replacement and payment and real-time customer responsiveness (Helms – Ettkin, 2000). Concepts of time vary dramatically across individuals and cultures.
Work is drawnfrom anthropology, psychology, sociology, and management to identify five dimensions of time that guide the review and discussion of dynamic
strategic management research. The five time dimensions are: nature of time, Real or epiphenomenal, experience of time – Objective or subjective, time flow – novel, cyclical, or punctuated, time structure – discrete time, continuous time, or epochal time andtemporal referent point – past, present, or future. Therefore, the perception of time of the company’s management influences the behavior related to the resource of time in the context of the decisions related to the speed of performance of the firm’s strategic courses of action (Mosakowski – Earley, 2000).

The reasons for speed acceleration in strategic processes

The development of...