What Speed Means to Marketplace Listeners

		Read More Speed Commentaries • Straight Up • Define Our Goals • At What Cost? • Time and Fruit • Workaholism • Faster and Faster • Overcoming Limitations • Length of Time • A State of Mind • Theory of Relativity • What About Honolulu? • A New Career From Speed • Speed Is Nothing New • It's All Relative • We're Being Sold Speed • Speed Means Missing Out • Time is Priceless • The Ride Keeps Getting Faster • Family First • Slowing Down for Frugality • Speed Serves Me • A Fortunate Layoff • Interruptions • Our Country's Material Obsession • A Personal Slowdown • Using Speed to My Advantage • I Don't Miss Much • Not Enough Hours In the Day • Peaceful • Speed, Oh Speed • Out of Control • I Live By Speed • Happy to Be Relaxed • Speed Is Choice Index of Comments

Length of Time (June 29)
There are times when speed is necessary to me and accepted. There are also times when taking it slow is necessary, too. I guess I like to go at the necessary pace, and a little rush and a little pokey is all right when the situation suits it. I am at a mixture of fast and slow, and it is dictated by necessity. It is my job that influences my pace; I am in sales. At home it can be fast-paced, but if it were my choice I would slow it down to be mellow. What speed is to me is length of time. Meaning, if you have less time to get something done speed becomes necessary. So, speed and time are in correlation to one another in my perspective.

Mike Fredrickson
Prior Lake, MN

A State of Mind (June 29)
Speed is a state of mind. It is the perception of the interaction between our ambition/expectation and the world's ability to meet it. That is why even the fastest event may not be fast enough to some, etc., etc.

Tom Easthope
Seattle, WA

Theory of Relativity (June 28)

Five years after graduating from the Temple University School of Business in 1968, I had the opportunity to join the family business. It was during the next several years that I learned the "Theory of Relativity." Speed and time is generationally relative. To the older family members, the pressure of doing business in a world of emerging computers and copy machines was almost too pressure-packed to endure.

Customers insisted upon price quotes in an astounding two weeks or less. Orders had to be manufactured and delivered in less than six weeks. At age 26, I was the only family member frustrated by unbearably long delays in information and production times. Everyone had to see the light.

During my next five years in "the Business," I introduced the industry's first computerized manufacturing system, installed modern business techniques, slashed production time to 3 1/2 weeks, and installed our first fax machine. Life was at last being brought up to speed. As the speed of operations increased, with quotes now taking two days and deliveries three weeks, more and more senior management fled to escape the unbearable pressure of a system stressed out on speed.

I am now 56 years of age (the same age my father was when I entered the business). Customers get annoyed if quote times exceed 15 minutes. Orders are manufactured and delivered in five days. All communications are done through the Internet in structures dictated by Excel, Access, and WordPerfect programs. EDS is king.

My daughter, who is 25 years old and a graduate of Pitt School of Business, is personally offended by our antique systems and the lack of future vision. I, on the other hand, am trying desperately not to become, well, overwhelmed. She has grown up as comfortable with all of today's modern communication speed balls as I once was with the telephone. As I watch her handling multiple calls with Palm Pilot, mutipurpose mouse, and digital interfaces, my only consolation is that I know the one thing she has yet to understand—the Theory of Relativity. Give her time; she will learn.

Thomas Davis
Philadelphia, PA

  Index of Speed Comments | Back to Speed.homepage..