Author Patrick Gruhn shares his vision of why companies need to be able to get themselves in shape to survive the ‘one-second economy’.

There is an irony to the fact that, while it didn’t hit the shops until mid-October, The Two-Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future – Just Enough by Vivek Ranadive and Kevin Maney was already top of the Amazon.com seller list in early September. It is a treatise on how the difference between 'good' and 'excellent' comes down to matter of just seconds – with, for instance, exploration of how it is that great ice hockey players are distinguished not by superbly accurate shots but by early anticipation of where the puck will be at particular moment. It also chimes with a theme I have written about before elsewhere – the arrival of the 'one-second economy'.
 
It may be a truism that our lives have been increasingly ruled by accelerating speed. Since the advent of industrial modernity, immediacy has been the touchstone of progress – whether symbolised by the electric razor, microwave oven or, heaven forbid, the drive-through Vegas wedding chapel. Now even two seconds is a long time and responses to news events are measured in 'tweets per second' (the breaking news of pop star Beyonce’s pregnancy brought a record of 8,868 tweets per second at the end of last month).
 
Many businesses are still yet to respond adequately to what a 'one-second economy' means for them. Too many think that 'next day dispatch' is a signal of immediacy – it isn’t. Or that scheduling a Monday morning meeting to address issues that arise on Thursday is speediness. How many garages still ask a driver to come back the day after a car’s been dropped off in order to get a quote of work to be done? And do they really expect repeat business if there’s a nearby competitor that can undertake, say, to instant message a quote within minutes?
 
I was at a management training session where the following exercise was done. Divided into two groups with a ten-metre gap, one group was given a piece of paper with a highly complicated phrase that they had to communicate to the other without saying anything. The 'communicating' team flailed around, trying to signal the phrase by use of charade actions. 'We had a team that managed to get the message across in under three minutes,' the instructor interrupted. The charade went on. 'Actually, we had a team that did it in just one second,' he added. And with that piece of extra information it clicked – a team member screwed up the piece of paper and threw it across to the other group. He hadn’t said a word.
 
A 'cheat' perhaps, but the point remains – there’s every chance that the tasks your businesses undertake can be done more efficiently and speedily. Force yourself to look for solutions. The brothers who founded the first Borders bookstore in 1971 did this by developing the first sophisticated bookstore inventory and stock-ordering system. Of course this subsequently became the norm, and we all know the rest of the story: the company itself fell victim to the rise of firms such as Amazon, offering a far more immediate and speedy book-buying experience.
 
Companies that allow customers to buy and transact online looked ahead of the curve say five years ago. Today if you don’t also have an iPhone or Android app to complement this as a business you could soon struggling, falling behind your competitors.
 
The explosion in social media, which will only gather pace, is one of the key trends at the forefront of this compression in action and response time that companies now have if they are to keep their customers happy.
 
Easyjet, for instance, has a dedicated twitter feed – @easyJetCare – that just responds to customer queries and complaints, woe betide a customer service department that these days just relies on phone and mail.
 
The spread of techniques such as just-in-time manufacturing to other areas, such as retail, where the demands of young ‘fast fashion’ trends insist that shops need to re-stock with new varieties of clothing, often within hours, has led to stores such as Primark stocking the ultimate in disposable clothing.
 
Whatever business you’re doing now will be done more quickly in a years’ time. Can you find the ways – and there are ways – to do it quicker first? Because as the one-second economy tightens its grip, you’re going to have to.

See also: Adapting for disabled customers