Drag Racing vs Rally Racing

Some of you that know me outside of my Uptime Blog posts know that I am a fan of Rally Racing. In part it is because I drive a Subaru so I was drawn to watch. (Yes, a blue STi with the handle on the back so that God can reach down and shake me when he thinks I am doing something dumb is mine.) But also I like Rally racing because it takes a real world car (granted, they gut the interior and up the strength a bit on the components) and drive it like fiends through corners, over dirt roads, through snow and over jumps. It is a real test of driver abilities and a lot of fun to watch or even play on a game console.

So what does this have to do with technology? It has to do with optimization and how optimized you can make a system, either people or computing. If you take the example of a Rally car they need to have horsepower yes, but that is not enough. You need to have torque, suspension flexibility, handling adjustability the ability to turn and to stop is just as important as the ability to go. In one stage you may be racing on a mostly strait asphalt road, in the next over a switch-back 180 degree turn infested gravel road through a forest. The ability to handle that change is very important to build into the car. Conversely if you look at a drag race car the need for handling, turning, even suspension decrease. What you need is horsepower and pure strait line speed (and hopefully the ability to stop, though if you look at some of these cars a parachute is what is used). How boring.

I maintain that business is much more like a Rally race than a Drag race. You never know what curve a competitor is going to throw at you next. The ability to handle those curves, stop on a dime, turn in the other direction and then go full bore ahead again is critical to business survival.

Sometimes though we seem to optimize our ability to go fast and go strait. We focus only on the immediate goal in front of us. Cut out items that are not critical to our achieving that strait ahead goal. We optimize our "people load", "trim the fat", etc. to keep everyone as utilized as possible moving towards the strait line goal. Then a change comes up... and we discover we can't turn as fast as when we started and we are surprised to find we even have a problem changing our direction simply due to momentum.

This is why things like Non-Functional Requirements are critical to a project and a companies long term success. They maintain the ability to turn and stop and give the slack necessary to allow a shift one step to the right. If we are all pushing so hard to go forward in a strait line even adjusting slightly to the side is difficult. In planning this is Risk Management. It's accepting that planning "if all things go right" is not going to really get you there.

Getting the right strategy means you have to assume your competitors are damn good, or at the very least as good as you are, and that they are moving just as fast or faster. When it comes to peering into the future, you just can't be paranoid enough.

- Jack Welch