7 Essential Elements to Lead With Speed
The April 2020 tech talk was presented by Alan Willett
Abstract:
One of the most important questions a leader can ask themselves is: “How do I get my teams, my organization to move faster?”
That is the challenge that all leaders face. This challenge grows more intense every day. This problem of speed is often disguised by other symptoms, such as “my projects cannot make an accurate prediction of when they will be done” or the stated need of “my teams need to take more risks.” The real need is not reckless risk-taking that will lead to even more problems and finishing even later. The real need is for speed.
Speed to value.
An organization can only move as quickly as its leaders.
Alan will provide insights from his new book Lead With Speed along with lessons he has learned since publication.
Innovation, or genius, is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.
This presentation will show you how to get from idea to glorious delivery faster. In other words, how to sweat faster.
About the Presenter
Alan Willett is a globe-trotting solo consultant helping organizations improve the speed and power of their engines of development. Alan is the award-winning author of Lead with Speed and Leading the Unleadable.
Alan Willett was the youngest of six kids on a dairy farm in Hunt, NY, which was (and still is) about a 30-minute drive to any stoplight. In Alan’s opinion, a stop sign would be okay in that town. The stoplight is a bit of high-tech overkill. The dairy farm has been in the family for almost 200 years. In Alan’s teenage years, the farm won Dairy Farm of the Year multiple times, while other farms failed. Alan learned how to be lucky by using data, technology, hard work, and logical decision-making.
After the farm, Alan went to Rochester Institute of Technology. There, he ran track and cross-country. He actually did run across the country with his team. The team was in the Guinness Book of World Records for running a relay from ocean to ocean in record time. While at college, as a side hobby to his athletics, he received a degree in computer science, which later became a Master’s degree.
When Alan started working in the high-tech world of high-pressure product development, he found that most of the projects used data much less than they did on the farm. On his projects, he put into place the use of data and logical decision-making.His travels eventually took him to work at the world-renowned Software Engineering Institute, the think tank of the world on high-tech development work. There, he was able to work with many of the geniuses that have pushed the state of the art. He worked with and was good friends with the late Watts Humphrey.