High Speed / Low Drag: Make Your Business Run Like it Needs To

2024/10/01: By Josh Ensign, CEO

Our mission at GxSpeed is to help our partners bring life-saving therapies and treatment to their patients faster.

Life sciences and healthcare organizations bring brilliant and innovative science to focus on the well-being of their patients and ensure the highest quality healthcare possible. But life sciences and healthcare organizations sometimes struggle with the parts of their businesses that are not their patients or their science– operations, technology, even their people.

GxSpeed supports your mission by bringing our industry expertise and innovative technology to accelerate what your team does, so you can focus on what matters – the patients and the science.

In a recent conversation with a friend in the pharma world, we were catching up on what each had been up to since our last conversation. I mentioned that my partners and I had launched GxSpeed and talked him through our mission and what we are doing.

That sounds great, he said, but how do you do all of that?

So I immediately talked about how we are producing value through rapid practical innovation, developing reusable capabilities that build on one another, and balancing the costs with the value. But as soon as I jumped into applying the concept of unit economics(1) – his eyes glazed over and he stopped listening.

Realizing that I’d lost his attention(2), I tried another tack. High speed / low drag, I said. It’s all about the concept of being high speed / low drag. That seemed to startle him back into interest, so I drew this on a napkin:

The same construct, like unit economics, can also apply down to the team or even individual level. The tech applications your team uses, the processes they use them in, even the interactions between the individuals on a team.

And so, I said to my friend, that is what GxSpeed does. It helps you accelerate your mission by becoming more high speed / low drag. Make your business run like you need it to by implementing good decisions for your people and your processes to do what you do better and faster.

He nodded and gave me a thumbs up.

Footnotes:

(1) Essentially, understanding the value of activities vs. the cost of those activities. This is generally applied across entire businesses or business units, but can also scale down to the individual level and individual activities, such as “am I getting more benefit out of running for this mile than the work it takes to go that mile+ how much this mile is going to hurt?”

(2) Always, always read the room. Lots of people are not good at reading the room and are also unaware they are not good at it. If you are not good at reading the room, you should practice. Then practice more. More to come on this subject, dear reader, in future installments.

(3) At least high speed / low drag makes sense as an aviation-related metaphor. Most others – building a plane while flying (i.e., figuring it out) and having plenty of runway (nonsensical because a runway is not a road) – not so much.

High Speed / Low Drag: Make Your Business Run Like it Needs To

Footnotes:

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