The Slow Company Manifesto
We live in a culture that celebrates speed.
To our detriment, the fast-food restaurant has become the model for how business is done. It is no coincidence that the 1960s gave birth to both the Big Mac and to “strategy” as we know it. Despite being equally full of empty calories, both have been on a victory march ever since.
Fast forward to the 1990s. Here we got the fast company. Literally. Launched in 1995, as the internet bubble was growing larger by the day, the magazine Fast Company became a key cultural force and a central mouthpiece for the idea that everything needed to move ever faster.
Nowhere has the idea of fast been more dominant than in Big Tech. Silicon Valley is obsessed with speed. When Google was just a few years old, its executives posted a memo of “ten things we know to be true” on its website. Item number three on the list? “Fast is better than slow.” Also, Facebook’s motto famously was “move fast and break things”.
Despite the obvious problems with Silicon Valley, corporate leaders in every industry tend to hold up Big Tech as the holy grail when new initiatives are to be developed and rolled out. Startups should be lean. Projects should be done in sprints. Blitzscaling should be everybody’s goal in a world where network effects mean that there is no prize for second place.
More generally, problem solving and decision making in our companies and organizations have come to look, feel and taste like a Happy Meal. Made with bad ingredients. Cooked up too fast. Produced by alienated and increasingly frustrated workers who daydream of being part of the Great Resignation, but who are also terrified to find out that it is the system that is broken, not their individual workplaces.
Hardly the recipe that will help us reimagine capitalism.
But look around and you see that business leaders are the odd ones out. Since the 1980s, we have seen a turn to slow throughout society.
Chefs and restaurant owners advocate slow food as a way for people to truly enjoy preparing and eating their dinner, ideally in the company of loved ones.
Proponents of slow media encourage investigative journalism that helps readers see the true story underneath the surface.
Doctors promote slow medicine to provide better treatment. We are encouraged to do slow travel by train or by bike and to spend time really experiencing not only places we visit, but also the places we pass en route to our destinations.
Then there is the whole idea of thinking, fast and slow. And Danish art group Superflex famously flooded a McDonald’s restaurant as a protest against the omni-present McDonalization of society.
In short, the list of people rebelling against fast and turning to slow goes on and on and on and on.
Except. The list stops when it comes to business.
Leave alone a few brave souls, the slow movement is largely unknown or actively frowned upon inside executive suites around the world.
This needs to change.
No more prepackaged strategy projects that fail time and again. Stop having the answer to any problem before taking the time to properly understand what is actually going on. Enough of endless back-to-back meetings that leave everyone exhausted.
Let us put an immediate nail through the idea that mindfulness and self-care during our time off can be anything but a distraction from the job at hand, namely to construct workplaces that are livable and truly and critically creative.
What we need are companies that dare move slowly. We need leaders who encourage reflection on how their companies can help tackle some of the world’s most pressing issues and be profitable at the same time.
We need product development teams that have the courage to stop and think about how their customers actually live and whether their products and services help them reach their true goals and aspirations.
We need investors who seek out zebras, tech companies that aim to grow slowly, rather than aspiring unicorns, companies that aim for a market capitalization of 1 billion USD as fast as possible.
We need boards of directors who do not play to the short termism of the stock market but take a longer view.
In short. We need slow strategy. Slow problem solving. Slow leadership. Slow companies.
This is not abstract. It starts with us. With this document, we commit to thinking hard about why we are doing what we are doing and how we help make the world a better place. We commit to using untraditional tools to help us think. For example, read novels. Go to galleries. Give ourselves a brush-up on disciplines like sociology and philosophy to really understand the large scale but sometimes rather subtle changes that we see throughout society. Or take time to actively engage with the science behind climate change. And we will ensure that those who do not have the luxury of slowing down are not left behind to live in a world of speed.
In short, we will keep reminding ourselves that it is much better to move in the right direction at a lower speed than to move really fast in the wrong direction. That sometimes, slow really is better than fast.
