Speed Is Life.

I did not invent the phrase. I heard it on every mission, starting in flight school. Instructors said it. Squadron mates said it. It was in every brief. Speed is life. In the air, speed is options. An aircraft that runs out of energy runs out of choices.

At Lycos I meant something closer to John Boyd. I meant tempo. The advantage goes to whoever observes, orients, decides and acts, and then does it again, before the other side has finished its first turn. When you run the loop faster, your competitor is always responding to a world that no longer exists.

The internet of the late 1990s was the purest test of that idea I have ever seen. Competitors shipped new features every few weeks. A quarter was a long time. A year was an era. A team that took six months to decide was not being careful. It was conceding.

So I said it at every management meeting. I said it to Bob Davis, our CEO, so often it became a refrain: Bob, speed is life. Over time it stopped being my phrase. Engineers said it to each other late at night, half as a joke and half as a creed. Bob later wrote a book and titled it Speed Is Life.

Speed of the loop, not speed of the legs

The fastest teams at Lycos were not the ones working the longest hours. They were the ones with clear intent, honest metrics and decisions made close to the work. Rhythm, metrics and delegation were all, in the end, ways of buying tempo.

Eric Ries gave the same idea a startup vocabulary in The Lean Startup: the edge goes to the team that turns the Build-Measure-Learn loop fastest. AI is now compressing the slowest parts of the loop. Research that took a team two weeks takes an afternoon. That raises the stakes on orientation. A leader with a stale picture can now make poor decisions faster, and at greater scale.

One more lesson was personal. At scale, your mood becomes weather. In a cockpit, my stress affected one other person. At Lycos, it could ripple through 350 people by lunchtime. A calm leader is not performing calm for show. He is protecting the team’s orientation.

Buy tempo

1. TempoCycle the loop before the other side finishes its first turn.
2. RhythmA fixed cadence of weekly, monthly and quarterly reviews tells people when decisions get made and when problems will be heard.
3. Decisions close to the workGive leaders the intent and step back. If the decision is a two-way door, let their call stand.
4. Ask what slows the loopAsk your team what slows their seeing, deciding or acting. Fix one thing within a week.
5. ComposureYour mood is the team’s weather. A calm leader protects everyone else’s orientation.