Who will win in the digital economy? It will come down to survival of the fastest. Heres how traditional businesses can accelerate in a world where time-to-everything matters more than any other strategic imperative. By Manish Bahl FAST, BUT NOT FURIOUS: THE SPEED YOU NEED TO WIN IN THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 淘宝店铺 “Vivian研报” 首次收集整理 获取最新报告及后续更新服务请在淘宝搜索店铺 “Vivian研报” 或直接用手机淘宝扫描下方二维码 3Fast, But Not Furious: The Speed You Need To Win in the Fourth Industrial Revolution | Executive Summary The pace of business change has intensified dramatically as the fruits of digital technologies expand beyond Silicon Valley to the entire economy in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.1 At the heart of this new digital world order is the unstoppable rise of automation, analytics and artificial intelligence (what we call the new machine), and with that comes unprecedented levels of speed speed of doing business, generating value, making decisions, meeting customer expectations and getting products and services to market. In short, it is speed that determines whether you disrupt or are disrupted. According to Forrester Research, over half of consumers will abandon their online purchases if they cant find quick answers to their questions.2 Great businesses built over decades and even centuries will be for naught if they cannot operate quickly enough. The tension between the fast pace of change and the optimal rate for established businesses to respond and adapt is growing as the leadership, legacy systems, business strategies, supply chains, organizational structures, skills and cultures of many of these established companies are simply not equipped to cope with the speed of change. Traditional companies, however, are in an excellent position to capitalize on the Fourth Industrial Revolution. They understand their markets, products and associated regulations better than anyone. They also have all the right assets to gain proprietary insights into their operations and markets. Where business leaders often struggle is in setting the right pace for their digital journey: fast enough to build the business of the future, but not so furious that they lose control. This is the mission behind this report: to help leaders adjust the speed of their response to the velocity of the changes taking place. This paper is an extension of our primary research, featured in our report series The Work Ahead, and our latest book, What To Do When Machines Do Everything. In this report, we describe a framework by which traditional businesses can assess their current speed of change and accelerate toward the right speed in a world where time-to-everything matters more than any other strategic imperative. THE SPEED MANDATE Digital disruption has something in common with Ernest Hemingways description of bankruptcy: It occurs “gradually, then suddenly.”3 Market changes that once took decades now transpire in weeks and months. New digital consumers seem to be born, literally, every minute. According to our Work Ahead research, the revenue derived from digital channels is also set to explode; by 2018, digital will account for more than 11% of all revenue on average for the businesses we surveyed, up from 4.6% in late 2015. This represents, if not exponential growth, a notable has- tening of the shift to digital. As S CEO Marc Benioff rightly said, “Speed is the new currency of business. If youre not going fast enough, someone else is.”4 In an age when a start-up can reshape an entire indus- try overnight, businesses must be on their A-game. For instance, Alipay, the worlds biggest payment company, had hit $100 billion in transactions in less than a year with zero branches, while DBS Bank in Singapore took 50 years to reach the same milestone.5 Its not a coincidence that many shareholders reports of S once a mass market is created, customers become bought into the need for the product and/or service. This, in essence, is the definition of abundance. Businesses can create markets of abun- dance by leveraging AI, analytics and automation to drive down the price point of products or ser- vices to compete and win in low-cost, high-volume markets. A good example is the success of Reliance Jio, a new telecom company in India, which aims to provide data services for as little as the cost of a postcard. The business reached 100 million subscribers in just 170 days, or roughly seven users per second per day, forcing the competition to lower their prices.13 Another way businesses can create a market of abundance is by leveraging start-ups within or out- side their industry, whether through acquisition or partnership. The key is to get these innovators into the businesss ecosystem to increase the speed of new opportunity creation and drive sales up to unprecedented levels. Speed to discovery. By leveraging the new machine, businesses can conceive of entirely new products, new services and new industries for the digital economy. Companies that are tr