The Clockspeed Trap

The email lands on a Wednesday. By Thursday, people are trying to decide everything.New job or new career. Stay in tech or leave it. Move city. Retrain. Sell the car. Fix the pension. Rebrand themselves on LinkedIn by the weekend.I have watched this up close. Over the past few weeks I have coached a number of people through the layoffs that also impacted me. The pattern is super common. Smart, capable people, trying to make every decision at once, and getting worse outcomes for the effort.The problem is not that they are panicking. The problem is that they are still running at a speed that was never theirs to begin with.Every company has a clockspeedCharles Fine, a professor at MIT, wrote a book called Clockspeed in the late nineties. Way before I was writing reviews of my favourite business books!The idea was simple. Every industry and company has an evolutionary pace, a rate at which it churns out new products, new processes, new versions of itself. Some move like fruit flies. Some…