Transcript Speaker 1 (00:05): Hi there. This week is a super interesting subject. We were analyzing the financial literature for stock market patterns, but we stumbled onto something completely different. It borrows a concept from the financial literature, but goes into life sciences and even references to physics to discover a wonderful reality. And let's jump right in to momentum is everything, all things being equal. What differentiates achievers from super achievers are success. From extraordinary success is the ability to handle and capitalize on this thing called momentum, execution, or even lack of. It is in momentum of some kind. Constantly execution produces outcomes. These outcomes could be successful or fall short of expectation and anticipations periods of real success, ones that are constantly in sync with aspirations can tend to be rare. They aren't constant. Now, business leaders who've achieved superior success have been known to term this as luck, providence, or even persistence. (01:08) Research tells us that in these key moments of experiencing greater outcomes, the extra successful people and businesses were able to capitalize on the momentum. For example, the creation of iPod and iTunes gave Apple the momentum and it never looked back by following that pattern of creation. It is one of the most admirable case studies on capitalizing on momentum. Similarly, there've been periods when other companies have had the opportunity, or any entrepreneur too has tasted surges of success. And in that moment, taken decisions that has either led to sustained success or withered away the momentum of it all. Let's understand first, what is momentum? Momentum is mass into velocity. The technical physics definition of momentum is P is equal to MV. P is momentum. Mass is denoted by m and V is velocity. So momentum is mass multiplied by velocity In business context, mass is the mass you're working with. (02:10) This could be your people, your partner, resources, products, systems. All of your ideas offers propositions, marketing strategies that went into it. All of this, some total of it all is your mass velocity is different from speed. Velocity is speed plus direction that is speed towards a directed shared destination or goal in a business context to understand velocity and it's important. Picture yourself driving a car. Now, what do you need to be able to successfully drive at faster speeds? You of course need skill else. You never can be confident of where you are headed. You need practice else. You won't be confident of keeping control. You need the tools, right? That is the ability of the vehicle itself. Else, you're never really sure what's happening. You need to be secure with the mechanics else. You remain fearful of trying and it needs to be more fun than scary else. (03:01) You don't really have a why to do it. And of course you need to know where you are going and that is your direction. Direction is your final destination. The company or business velocity is no Different businesses need skills or capability else. They aren't going to be confident. Businesses need practice and experience to have control. Businesses need the tools, system processes know-how else they can never be sure of hitting their targets. People need certain bit of security to be able to take risks as else they will go into playing safe. And the culture overall environment needs to ensure that it is more fruitful than fear else. People rarely don't have a why and it all needs to head towards a certain shared goal. So P is equal to mv. Momentum is equal to mass into velocity. Now, when a period of success appears, whether by chance or by practice, what may cause it to lose the steam or wither away. (03:56) Within this particular theory, there are only three variables, mass, speed and direction. Therefore, businesses may make decisions that affect one of the three. For example, we could strongly understand the combination producing that success and alter people, partner resources, products, processes or systems. At the emergence of iPhone, for example, Nokia is documented to be operating without a chief technology officer and they could never respond in the process to the design challenge. Despite having 40% market share at the time, we could wrongly understand skill practice tool security fund the elements of speed and any change or alteration in one element is enough to slow down the whole vehicle or the whole business and we could fail in direction. Many businesses energized by the results tend to alter their goal too fast, right? They might increase it by a bigger ambition and it sometimes has a crash effect because one of the speed sets or MOS sets is just not ready for the bigger goal. (04:57) If you alter direction frequently, that is your goal. Frequently moss is confused, speed is compromised. If you make too many changes in the mosque, it takes longer to speed up naturally. And if you alter the tools for the speed, the goals will take longer to achieve. Momentum is everything, and the critical question is this, how does your mass travel with speed in the right direction and towards the same direction? Take a look at this graph. These are the known barriers to momentum, which is divided into leadership, systemic competence, motivation, and their impact on overall execution. So in the leftmost column of leadership, 1, 2, 5, 7 are all about leadership. Number one, unclear direction affects the direction itself. Of course. Number two, poor cross-functional communication. It affects the MO and speed. Inadequate delegation, again, will slow the resources down and excessive change in again leads to poor direction. (05:59) So that these are the leadership barriers to momentum three and six are cultural bureaucratic norms and bureaucracy will slow execution and decision-making it's quite well known and acceptance of poor performance will impact the overall skillset available. And the standards of performance either will impact the skills that are needed for speed. Four is missed. Deadlines under the effect on competence and missed deadlines will obviously impact speed directly. And we can see in the graph how all of these elements have an effect on motivation to achieve the goal. That is the mass. One of the key strategic tasks of leadership and entrepreneurship is to understand momentum and execution. In a s spite to success, one can get greedy and revise the goals or direction without realizing whether their system of people capital and ability is ready to achieve it, which is mass readiness or has the skill practice tools and culture to achieve it, which is speed readiness, non readiness pushes the business to an experience of failure against the stated goal and it loses momentum. (07:06) A key to remember though, that had the goal not been revised, the same result might have been a success when measured against the previous goal and that would've actually helped. Momentum. There is a quote attributed to Einstein, which is compound and trust is the eighth wonder of the world. He understands it, earns it, he who doesn't pays it. This is a prime example of sustained momentum. Compounding predictably, sustainably automatically results into exponential growth. In conclusion, when you have a spite of success, it is time to analyze what led to it and keep doing it. It might not be the best time for change. It is a time to actually compound momentum is everything. How does your mass in your business travel with speed in the right direction toward the same direction? Understanding this little slide on mass and velocity can be a full strategic plan in itself. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I was excited about discovering momentum. It can mean many things to a business and implementing it in the right way can be a make or break situation.