Competing Against Time : How Time-based Competition is Reshaping Global Markets

by George Stalk Jr.

Two consultants explain how companies utilize the time element in production, product development, and sales distribution to gain the business edge

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Productivity, Management, Leadership, Self Help, Entrepreneurship

285 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1990

About the author

George Stalk Jr. is Senior Partner and Managing Director for The Boston Consulting Group as well as an Adjunct Professor of Strategic Management for the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto. He joined BCG in 1978 and has worked in its Boston, Chicago, Tokyo and Toronto offices. His professional practice focuses on international and time-based competition. He holds a BSEM from the University of Michigan, an MSA&AE MIT and MBA from Harvard Business School. George Stalk Jr. co-authored a best-seller on “time-based” competition, Competing Against Time, and Kaisha: The Japanese Corporation. A somewhat controversial book, Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or to Playing to Win? was published in October of 2004. George Stalk Jr.’s latest book: Memos to the CEO: Strategies in Our Future was published in early 2008. He has also been published in several business publications, including the Harvard Business Review where he has won the McKinsey Award for the best article.

Reviews

[Cedric Chin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I gave this 5 stars because it's a fantastic, comprehensive, overview of time-based competition. (For strategy nerds familiar with Hamilton Helmer's 7 Powers, this is the 'process power' that Helmers talks about in that book — though it's a lot more subtle than most people think).

The book is a bit tedious in parts, which means that you have to be a bit *cough* strategic in the way you read it. But it does give a good overview of a particular form of strategy, and the final chapter ties together all the threads in a way that felt satisfying and complete. In brief, I think the bits that are most important are as follows:

- What is time based strategy and why does it work?
- What is the history of strategic advantages available to the firm from the 50s through to the 80s?
- How did the Japanese stumble onto this strategy?
- What is the time elasticity of profitability (certain customer segments are more sensitive to time, and are more willing to pay for it; how do you calculate the profit margins that are available for capture?).
- What does a time-based organisation look like?
- How do you transform a traditional firm into a time-based org? (I skimmed this, as it was less relevant to me).
- Why companies who want to become time-based competitors inevitably have to push their suppliers to change as well.
- How to apply time-based competition as a competitive strategy.

The questions that I have left after reading the book are as follows: first, is there a response to time-based strategy? The book concludes with "none have been found thus far", but it was published in 1989. I'm willing to bet that certain responses do exist by now.

And, second: Tim Cook is known to assign this book to subordinates when he was Ops Czar at Apple. Why did he do so? How does Apple use this? What are the implications on Apple's business today?

I'll be on the lookout for the answers to these questions.

[Nathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

It took me a surprising time to realize this was from 1990! I was reading it for the general business principles, and we still hold up Japanese agile Toyota-style employee-empowered manufacturing as a role model (now for software and not just physical goods) so I hope I can be forgiven. I gave up (holy crap this is LONG) but I did get a few things out to stash away:

Avoiding price competition by moving into higher-margin products or services is called margin retreat—a common response to stepped up competition and a response that can eventually lead to corporate suicide.

I liked the idea of "how much of the time in the factory is product actually being worked on?" and am chewing on how that applies to software:

Factory layout can contribute to reducing production complexity and, thus, time consumption. Traditional factories are organized by process technology centers. For example, metal goods manufacturers often organize their factories into shearing, punching, and braking departments; electronic assemblers have stuffing, wave-soldering, wire harnesses, assembly, testing, and packaging departments. Parts are moved from one process technology center to the next. Each step consumes valuable time: parts sit, wait to be moved, are then moved, then wait to be used by the next step. Amazingly, in traditional manufacturing systems, products usually receive value for only 0.05 percent to 5 percent of the time they are in the system. The rest of the time, products are waiting to receive value.

On colocating teams:

Placing all the functions required to meet performance objectives into empowered, focused cells closes the time distances between the employees that must make the system work and shortens the feedback loops required for the cell to react to changing events. This type of organization eliminates the layers of management that previously provided coordination from a distance.

This story rocks:

A classic example of the variety war was the battle that erupted between Honda and Yamaha for supremacy in the motorcycle industry, a struggle popularly known in Japanese business circles as the H-Y war. Yamaha ignited the H-Y war in 1981 when it announced the opening of a new factory that when full, would make it the world’s largest manufacturer of motorcycles—a position of prestige then held by Honda. Honda had been watching Yamaha’s gradual gain of production share for several years. It had chosen not to respond because it had been concentrating its corporate resources on building its automobile business, and away from its motorcycle operations. Now faced with Yamaha’s overt and public challenge, Honda chose to counterattack. Honda launched its attack with the war cry, “Yamaha wo tsubusu!” This is a rather impolite Japanese phrase that roughly translates as, “We will crush, squash, butcher, slaughter, etc. Yamaha!” In the no-holds-barred battle that ensued, Honda cut prices, flooded the distribution channel with new products, and boosted advertising expenditures. Most important—and most visible to consumers—Honda also increased the rate of change in its product line rapidly. Honda used expanding variety to bury Yamaha under a flood of new products. At the start of the war, Honda had about 60 models of motorcycles in its product line. Over the next 18 months, Honda introduced or replaced 113 models, effectively turning over its entire product line twice. Yamaha also began the war with about 60 models but was only able to manage 37 changes in its product line during those 18 months. Honda’s massive new product introductions devastated Yamaha. First, Honda succeeded in making motorcycle design a matter of fashion, where newness and freshness are important attributes to customers. Second, Honda increased the technological sophistication of its products, introducing four-valve engines (that would later be the basis for its automobile engines), composites, direct drive, and other new features and technologies. Next to Honda’s motorcycles, Yamaha’s bikes looked old, out-of-date, and unattractive. Demand for Yamaha motorcycles dried up. In a desperate effort to move them, dealers were forced to price them below cost, but even this did not help. At the most intense point of the H-Y war, Yamaha had more than 12 months of inventory in its dealer network. Finally Yamaha surrendered. In a public statement, Yamaha President Eguchi announced, “We want to end the H-Y war. It is our fault. We cannot match Honda’s sales and product strength. Of course there will be competition in the future, but it will be based on a mutual recognition of our respective positions.”2 Honda did not go unscathed either. The company’s sales and service network was severely disrupted, requiring additional investment before it returned to a stable footing. However, so decisive was its victory that Honda effectively had as much time as it wanted to recover. It had emphatically defended its title as the world’s largest motorcycle producer and had done so in a way that clearly warned Suzuki and Kawasaki not to challenge that leadership. Variety had won the war.

The point at which I could no longer pretend this was in any way a modern book:

Today, the fastest growing mode of transmission is the facsimile, known as “fax.”

[Daniel Axelsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read because Tim Cook was reading it. Wouldn't recommend unless you have a strong historical interest in supply chain methods.

A few random notes I took down:
- "Companies are showing remarkable results by focusing their organizations on responsiveness"
- "As a strategic weapon, time is the equivalent of money, productivity, quality, and even innovation"
- Interestingly, when this book was first published in 1990, the Japanese were doing very well, and the book repeatedly praises their processes
- Interesting case study of Citi offer faster mortgage approvals, given the sensitivity to time of buyers and realtors
- OODA loop (observation, orientation, decision, and action), interesting that they reference the USAF's / Boyd's method (but don't mention Boyd)

[Sanford Chee]

Recommended by Tim Cook.
Farnam Street May 2023
https://podcasts.apple.com/sg/podcast...

[Eugene Gapon · Rating 3 out of 5]

George Stalk argues that companies that prioritize time over cost are more likely to succeed. He provides examples of companies that have successfully implemented time-based strategies to gain a competitive advantage. However, some of the cases and situations presented in the book may be outdated and might not be applicable to today's businesses.

[Huy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this on Tim Cook's recommendation. Overall, this is a good book. Even though this book was written about 30 years ago, many of its points are still relevant to current business situation. One bad point of this book is its single tone that makes it quite boring to read.
A few key take-aways:
_ Time is the new bedrock for today's competitive advantage; cost-based competition is no longer applicable in this fast-changing world.
_ A company gains its market share by how fast and responsive it deliver goods or services to customers. The more time sensitive the customers are, the higher price they are willing to pay.
_ Becoming time-based organization requires clear strategies, which focus on the company value delivery system and coordinate all stakeholders.
_ Good analysis and in-depth information is boring without story-telling.

[Clurtle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not what I expected considering it’s a Tim Cook rec. Would suggest the Goal for 80% coverage of the material. The book had some really good nuggets, but droned on quite a bit on the same points. The same points were often repeated multiple times in the same chapters and then again in following chapters. Maybe these were originally blogs, but I expect more due diligence in a book. There were often misspellings in the charts, charts which a confounding number of symbols to the point of unreadability and even charts that were obvious. To be frank, these felt like someone trying to reach a word count because the repetition really annoyed me throughout the book. The print quality was also really bad, word on the back bleeding into the binding. The cover image was pixelated. A surprising lack of care went into making the book.

Honestly, if the book were 100 pages, it would be one of the great classics without a doubt. It would be a must read if reading The Goal left you yearning for just a bit more. While the author made me suffer to get through his points, I did discover some prescient nuggets.

1. Dont focus on cost, focus on time. Costs hides too many things. It averages losses and hides gains. You don’t see depts that perform better than others that might be losing a lot of money. Time is unbending and a very honest metric.
2. If you compete on time, you can charge a premium. The book says 20%, but I’m sure that’s not the upper bound. Your true customers likely value convenience more than you think.
3. It’s in a startup’s best interest to compete on time. Find a weakness in a large competitor and exploit it faster than they can adapt themselves. This is especially effective if you competitor does not compete on time.
4. An observation, if a company thinks people are loyal to their brand, there might be an opportunity to disrupt their advantage if you compete against them with quality and time.
5. Do not compete head to head with a company. Instead work in the shadows to build your growth rate, then when you’re revealed, they’ll never be able to catch up.
6. You have to decide whether to compete on time, wait it out or retreat. Competing on time is the only way to maintain growth against other time sensitive competitors. Waiting it out will likely mean your company will decay away, maybe getting bought out. Retreating to a fringe like luxury only delays the inevitable.
7. Pivoting to the luxury category is not a great strategy is sales volume goes down 25%. Your growth will be pinned by the time sensitive competitor.
8. Observation: Ironically, wealthier people are fairly time sensitive, so if you decide that 1-2 years lead times are ok because you’re a luxury product, you will likely not be in business long (cough cough Rolex)
9. Fast loops allow for more variety. More variety allows for domination of the market / higher customer satisfaction with customizations.

[Ryan Blanchette · Rating 3 out of 5]

This concept was seminal to business strategy and a huge cornerstone of BCG's consulting offering in the 90's. The examples are very dated, and the specific strategies to enable time-based competition (e.g. lean manufacturing) are better described in other works.

There are a couple of gems in the book, the biggest being insight into how a focus on Time drives strategy with customers and segmentation, and how it affects companies internally. Lastly the recommendations for how using a Time-based mindset with competitor benchmarking is unique and insightful (p.209)

[Ben Merton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing to think a book that was written 30 years ago is still so relevant today.

Even more amazing that my co-founder and I have spent two years developing our own thesis about saving time for manufacturing companies at our startup, Unifize, only to discover we’ve been reinventing the wheel!

This is a fantastic insight into what many companies still fail to implement a generation later: time-based competitiveness.

[Collin Rhea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense read, but had me finding applications across various business issues I've come across and kept me coming back enough to finish

[Omar Khedr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book that talks about time and business. Definitely from an earlier 90s era but still useful to see how things have and haven’t changed

[Nate Kapitanski · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I could give half star ratings I'd give this one a 3.5 star. It's good, but it was dreadfully boring to me at times. Maybe because I'm in the software world and not the hardware world. I did learn a lot from this book though, being that I'm not in the hardware world. The overall objective of focusing on being time-based and not cost-based is a great eye opener though.

Good read, but not 5 star "Good To Great" amazing, to me.

[Preston Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

The principles here are really important.

Product improvement is like traveling around a racetrack. The quicker you can get around to sooner you can get your next generation product to market. Several times around that track faster than you competitors and they may as well file for bankruptcy.

[Glenn Burnside · Rating 3 out of 5]

I get that this one of Tim Cooks favorites, but it's time I admit that I'm no Tim Cook. Try as I could I just couldn't get interested in this one. The concepts are sound but difficult to access. I think more recent books on lean thinking are a better starting point these days.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Innovative business books rarely stand the test of time. This 1990 book from Boston Consulting Group does.

[Ebiteh Denis]

good book

[Adilos Tof]

Time is now added to the other three critical factors in order to remain competitiveness in the market – money, productivity, and quality