Slow Company - The Book Website

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Slow Company is a business book and a work in progress. The purpose of this website is to present the project and get valuable feedback, ideas, comments and thoughts. Anything is welcome. Thank you!

Slow Company is maybe a strange name for a book about fast companies. However, Slow Company has a simple message: To be fast, you first have to be slow and get things right. What defines many successful companies is what they did before getting fast; their strategy and management during The Set-up Phase. And, how they identified the Acceleration Point - the moment when they started to grow rapidly. The book is about planning and managing for speed, expansion and success.

What is a "Slow" Company? Slow Companies allow for ”set-up time” to test and reject ideas, refine the business model and develop a winning culture – then grow exponentially and fast. They have a disciplined approach to innovation. Slow Companies focus on a few products and become leaders in their niche markets – then explode into new innovative customer offerings. Slow Companies build customer base through the value proposition of their products – then expand by advertising and marketing to reinforce the brand. Slow Companies do not attempt to get big until the time is right. When the Slow Company reaches the Acceleration Point, then high speed and fast expansion comes naturally, like a breeze.

The concept of a Slow Company has nothing to do with age or the time it takes to reach a certain scale of revenues and profitability. Slow Companies are about a common business pattern and growth curve: Long set-up time and fast exponential growth.

IKEA needed 30 years set-up time before defining the concept that made it grow into the world’s largest furniture retail company. Fashion company H&M opened it first shop in Sweden in 1947, then expanded abroad to Denmark 20 years later, continued to launch stores in three more countries during the next 20 years and then finally took off opening stores in 16 countries rapidly reaching over 1,000 stores worldwide.

A much younger company, Google, spent around four years of set-up time perfecting the search engine technology that made them the global number one before letting their creativity explode into numerous user tools, applications and services around the mission of organizing the world's information. Amazon.com first made sure it had the world’s greatest online book store and a culture obsessed with customer experience before attempting, and eventually succeeding, to sell virtually everything online. Apple needed to be a struggling computer company for almost 20 years to finally re-emerge as a brilliant consumer and home electronics company.

Other examples of Slow Companies are the German retail chains Aldi and Schlecker, the US outdoor gear and clothing company REI, fashion company American Apparel, coffee chain Starbucks and Irish airline Ryanair. Slow Company takes a look at both large and medium sized companies, both listed and privately owned. The key success indicators are growth, sales and profits. The companies are selected by "Slow Company" criteria, referring to their growth pattern and management philosophy.

Slow is a metaphor for letting businesses develop organically and moving at the speed of the customers. Being "slow" is being committed long term and eventually being faster and more successful in the same way that the turtle beats the hare in the fable. The paradox is that you rarely get fast by running fast. Slow Company wants to challenge the concept of high speed in business and introduce the concept of Basic Speed, which makes the company competitive by staying focused, keeping things simple and reducing cost and complexity.

The purpose of the book is to find what Slow Companies have in common that make them successful and provide readers with down to earth (and provocative) strategy, like "Don't advertise to build a brand", "Don’t be creative – focus and say no to new ideas" and "Scale down to scale up". It's about how to use conventional business wisdom to build unconventional companies. Slow Company takes an evolutionary perspective, emphasizing the strategic choices that made the Slow Companies winners.

Slow Company aims to answer critical questions: What’s good about being Slow? What do companies accomplish by thinking Slow that they couldn’t accomplish by doing things faster? What happens in the Slow stage from a management perspective? What are the strategic choices? How does Slow Companies compare with other companies that made other “non-Slow” choices? What are the risks with being Slow? What makes Slow Companies successful? How did the managers of the Slow Companies identify the Acceleration Point, and how did they decide when it was time for speed? What characterizes the Slow Company – how is it owned, how does it recruit, how does it innovate, how does it market and how does it expand? And – finally, how do you manage your own company in a Slow way?

Around the world, there is a need for understanding how to build great companies. The target group is entrepreneurs, managers, academics and consultants. Slow Company's style is informal, case-based storytelling structured around 10-15 companies.

Slow Company is inspired by - and challenges - Jim Collin's Built to Last, but looking at younger companies, from another perspective, in another time. However, Slow Company is not a big research project and does not attempt to scientifically measure the studied companies in a quantitative way. It's rather a qualitative and subjective account of some remarkable companies, providing the reader with success factors, insights and conclusions.

Slow Company would not exist without the business movement in the 1990's, some called it the new economy, and the books that both analyzed and created this movement. There are two kinds of business books - the ones about things that change constantly, and the ones about things that never change. In the change and chaos category you find book like Managing At the Speed of Change by Daryl Conner (1993), Reengineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and James Champy (1993), Only the Paranoid Survive by Any Grove (1999), Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy by Stand Davis and Christopher Meyer (1999), Out of Control (1994) and New Rules for the New Economy (1998) by Kevin Kelly, Competing for the Future by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad (1996) and Amazon.com: Get Big Fast by Robert Spector (2000). Other important references are Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm (1991) and Inside the Tornado (1995).

In the category of timeless principles Tom Peters and Robert Waterman's In search of Excellence (1982) stands out as a groundbreaking piece of work. And in one of the most influential business books of all time - Built to Last (1994) - Jim Collins and Jerry Porras showed what made a Visionary Company a great enterprise. The book is a study of enduring (read: old, the average founding date being 1897) US companies like IBM, Boeing, General Electric, 3M and Philip Morris, companies that have existed for around a 100 years and where the founders are long gone - indeed slow companies with a long term view. Built to Last surveyed large, listed multinational corporations (selected by surveying American CEO:s from Fortune 500 companies) with stock performance as the key success criterion, and then compared these Visionary Companies with Comparison Companies. The authors pointed out what the Visionary Companies did differently from the others and provided principles like "Preserve the Core/Stimulate progress". There was also a strong and inspiring message: You too can build a great company.

Built to Last was the result of a systematic and ambitious 6-year academic research project, examining many aspects of the studied companies. It was written in the pre-dotcom era and could be described as something of an "In Search of Excellence for the 1990's". Jim Collins followed up with Good to Great in 2001.

Another obvious point of reference for Slow Company is, needless to say, the US business magazine Fast Company, launched by Bill Taylor and Alan Webber in 1995. Together with Wired, another important monthly publication that became the voice of a changing business industry, Fast Company set the agenda for a new generation of business leaders. But while Wired was about the bigger picture of social change brought about by technology, Fast Company focused on the personal and practical side of business; work, careers, leadership, competition and organization in new exciting companies that were a result of technology, globalization and generation shift.

It might seem that a book called Slow Company would oppose the ideas of a magazine called Fast Company. It doesn't. On the contrary, Slow Company would embrace most of Fast Company's articles about teamwork, innovation, competition, new practices and outstanding individuals. And the metaphor "fast" is not really about speed, but rather about being "smart" and "busy doing the right thing". However, there was an underlying assumption that speed was good and that getting big fast was the ultimate sign of success.

The ideological inner struggle between the fast and the enduring has long been a theme in Fast Company. The magazine invited Jim Collins to challenge the short term, here-and-now, opportunistic perspective of business, resulting in an critical and now famous article called Built to Flip in March 2000, arguing that ultimately companies must be built to work. Fast Company later challenged Built to Last in an article from November 2004, asking whether the book itself would last given that almost half of the Visionary Companies from 1994 had slipped dramatically in performance and reputation (also the fate of several of the companies surveyed in In Search of Excellence). In a constantly changing business environment it is always a risk to promote a collection of "great" and "enduring" companies that end up being victims of change a decade later. That's also the paradox of writing about long term success - the book itself might have short term relevance, unless you disregard the actual list of companies and cases and instead focus on the conclusions. A great business book is not primarily about enduring companies - it's about enduring ideas.

Unlike Built to Last, Slow Company does not predict whether the studied companies will be around for long or not, but presents what things they did right from the Slow Management perspective given the time, place and business environment.

Fredrik Arnander, a graduate from the Stockholm School of Economics, is a Swedish entrepreneur and author. In the early days of the Internet boom, Fredrik left his job as a management consultant to work for the Internet agency Icon Medialab, a really fast company that grew from zero to over 3,000 employees in more than ten countries in just four years. Since then he has founded several companies; Fondex (one of Europe’s first online fund supermarkets), Sidewalk Express (Scandinavia’s largest chain of Internet access points), Keybroker (search marketing) and Brighthandle (an industrial design company and a joint venture with the global locks group Assa Abloy). Fredrik is the chairman of interactive advertising agency Starring and on the board of the new high-tech health chain Balance. He was a founding partner and strategy consultant with Normann Partners, a think-and-do-tank for top-management, focused on innovation and entrepreneurship. To diffuse ideas and knowledge outside the business community Fredrik started Transfer, today Sweden's largest non-profit organization for bringing speakers from companies to teach in schools.

The author's first English book Managing.com (FT.com/Pearson Education, 2001) is about lessons learned from Internet companies. Even though the book was intended as a field book for new technology ventures, Amazon wrote in their review that "his recollections of early Internet pioneers and his experiences of working in two Swedish start-ups add a human dimension that prevents Managing.com from reading like a manual". However, in all sincerity, many of the ideas in the book were not very enduring.

Coming to re-think the concept of "fast" and "speed" when founding new companies after selling and leaving his company Fondex in 2001, Fredrik started to define the idea of the Slow Company, that is fast in another way than just doing everything at high speed. In an article in Brainheart Magazine in 2002 - The Limits of Speed - journalist Marta Sandén invited Bodil Jönsson, Professor at the Department of Design Sciences at Lund Institute of Technology and Fredrik Arnander to meet face to face and discuss the question of time. The interview also touched upon the personal aspects of business, of how we work:

Jönsson: We need set-up time to leave one activity and switch to another, a kind of time to think things over or let them mature, in order to do our own or the collective work, but also to have shared experiences and to create frames of reference.

Arnander: Set-up time; I really like that concept. During the Internet boom, sometimes we lost our sense of time - had two days gone by, or a month? Clock time became irrelevant - people lived at the office so they could manage to do more. They rarely did - what they were doing became something else, or more, or changed, or wrong. Companies had to start up too fast. There was no room for reflection, to digest your thoughts, no set-up time.

And there, somewhere around 2002, the idea to write Slow Company was born. Business take time.