Ford Motor Company’s CEO Jim Hackett is instituting a “shot clock”—from the basketball rule designed to quicken the pace of the game—to get the company to make faster decisions. This is crucial not only in automotive—with the rapid changes brought on by innovations like self-driving and electric cars—but across all business segments: every company must speed decision making and reaction times to market change.
It might just save your company—just like many think it saved the NBA. In a Thanksgiving week game in 1950, the Fort Wayne Pistons beat the Minneapolis Lakers 19-18; the two teams sank only 8 baskets. Four seasons later, the NBA introduced a shot clock, giving each team 24 seconds to shoot or hand over possession of the ball. That year, the Boston Celtics were the first team to ever average over 100 points per game over the season; three years later, every team did it. Fast forward to Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, LeBron James, Steph Curry, and the NBA global powerhouse.
But how do you make faster decisions? You need more than yesteryear’s conference table, where stakeholders sat around to tinker with ideas. What you need today is an electronic conference desktop—an “e-table”—a unified platform for collaboration supported by up-to-the-minute feeds and analytic processing of your business, market, and competitor data. Ford Motor Company is an example. The use of a platform enables companies to capture insights and expertise from across a business’ entire ecosystem to quickly connect the dots between people, ideas, and data.
The NBA turned on the shot clock because it wanted to inject excitement into the game. Business is about excitement too: exciting customers with new products and services, exciting executives and employees with an innovative, fast-moving work culture, and exciting recruits—especially new tech talent—to come and work for the firm.
In Ford’s case, there’s a strong design element. “Design ultimately approaches problems in human-centric ways and by understanding human needs involved,” said Barclays analyst Brian Johnson, as reported by Automotive News. “Mr. Hackett aims to evolve product to make it into a necessity in a way where prior products weren’t necessities—just in the same way that the iPhone became a human necessity, vs. the Blackberry, which wasn’t.”
IBM has caught a version of shot clock fever as well. According to the Wall Street Journal, part of the reason for its recalling thousands of remote workers back to the office was to “redevelop its workplaces around a new system of teamwork; the company has also trained 160,000 employees on working more nimbly.”
If you don’t take a shot at something new—quickly, when you see an opening—someone is going to grab the ball. When you turn on a shot clock, everybody around the e-table must pass the ball—their ideas and market savvy—back and forth crisply to find that opening first.
