In the rapidly emerging, global digital business environment, the speed of change will be limited only by the laws of physics. What kind of organizations will thrive in such a world? According to the Theory of Relativity, time stands still for an object traveling at the speed of light. Therefore, viable companies in the near future will be those that achieve the calm – the zero time – at the eye of the storm of change, by learning to move at lightspeed.
These “Zero Time” companies will react to change before it happens and provide value for every customer at every opportunity. They will recognize and satisfy customer needs before they are articulated. They will identify future markets, often years before they actually emerge, and rapidly acquire the competencies needed to capture those markets. And they will zero in on valued customers and act quickly to forge lifelong partnerships with them.
While all of this may sound like science fiction, it is very close to becoming business fact. As you will discover in the pages of this groundbreaking book, many of today’s most successful corporations already possess Zero Time capabilities, and it is only a matter of a few years before fully-evolved Zero Time companies appear on the scene. Once they do, those companies who cannot or will not take the evolutionary leap into Zero Time will become extinct.
In Zero Time, three leading researchers from the University of Texas-affiliated IC² Institute offer us our first glimpse of the Zero Time corporation. They explain how technology is impacting upon organizations and, with the help of fascinating case studies from Intel, Ford, Amazon.com, Dell, and other near-Zero Time companies, they identify the five key disciplines needed to become a Zero Time organization, including:
Zero Value Gaps: aligning company values with a select group of right customers in order to deliver absolute gratification and lock in customer loyalty for life Zero Learning Gaps: mastering three types of learning-stealth, just-in-time, and rapid learning-and instantly converting learning into customer value
Zero Management Gaps: restructuring an organization holonically so that every part contains the entire organization’s information, knowledge, and capacity for action
Zero Process Gaps: aligning work processes throughout the company in order to achieve zero resistance to total customer service
Zero Inclusion Gaps: bringing all relevant parties into the decision-making process, including suppliers, customers, and customers’ customers
A visionary guide to surviving and thriving in a superfast business world, Zero Time is must reading for managers at mid- to large-scale companies in every industry-and for e-business start-ups who want to get it right the first time.