The Age of Speed – my recap
Mathieu | Sunday, August 9th, 2009 | No Comments »
A few weekends ago I picked The Age of Speed off my bookshelf. I usually read one book at home, one on audio book in the car and then one at the office. I had just finished reading Here Comes Everybody and while I have been thinking of reading The Starbucks Experience, this one had been sitting on my shelf for a while.
Author Vince Poscente’s overall theme is there are four type of businesses today, Zeppelins, Balloons, Bottle Rockets and Jets, but only one of them will lead to continued success.
Jets are the companies that recognize speed is a natural phenomenon of today’s society, grasp hold of it and align their business with characteristics of the speed economy will be the only ones who realize true growth and success.
Poscente’s description of speed can be best summed up by a few popular catch phrases: on demand, always on, more-faster-now. It’s not about how to file TPS reports quicker or how to make your shipping fleet more efficient, it’s about recognizing where you customers want something, whether it be a better check-out experience at the grocery
store or access to online help and moving your company in a quick way to make the necessary changes to make the improvement. By doing so you’ll be able to keep the customers you do have and attract new ones.
His approach to speed is it’s a mind set and not a physical action. He says there is a difference between being busy and being fast even though most people would associate the two as being the same thing. While there aren’t a lot of original ideas in The Age of Speed, he does take a different path in one area and that’s with respect to multi-tasking. He contends when you are focused on one task, you can use your whole brain for that function (makes sense) but when you start multi-tasking you simply cannot dedicate more than 50% of your brain power to any one task.
Author Vince Poscente
As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t find anything revolutionary in this book and while there are a few interesting case studies/stories there are no “ah-ha” moments and certainly anyone who would consider picking up this book would probably have already had the discoveries for themselves that could potentially be hidden in its pages.
Most frustrating is there is only one chapter in which the title indicates it might be dedicated to actually explaining how you can harness speed but after the five or so pages it failed to deliver.
Which brings me to my last observation about The Age of Speed. While it’s not really a great book at all, it’s smaller than your average hardcover, the font is a tiny bit larger than normal and every other page is an “illustration” (really just a line or two of white text with a black background). So the book reads very quick.
Oh – one bonus observation. I’m currently audio booking The Speed of Trust by Stephen M.R. Covey (the son of the Seven Habits author, Dr. Stephen R. Covey) and while the two have little in relation there’s a recommendation from Covey on the back of The Age of Speed. The Speed of Trust is a great book (so far) and it is a bit quirky for Covey to be recommending this book and I wondered if it’s just because the titles are similar.
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