Speed, Momentum, and the 20-Mile March
On a recent Direct Application podcast, I sat down with my good friend Chuck Hollingsworth, a 40-year manufacturing leader now with Keurig Dr Pepper. I ask him this: Everyone wants results - especially the C-suite and shareholders - and they want them fast these days. How do you lead when the optics demand speed (or the “tyranny of the urgent” as my mother would say), but the truth (e.g. the ability to scale a culture takes time) requires patience?
That’s the dilemma every leader faces: What do you do when your strategic vision takes longer than your stakeholders’ attention span?
Chuck offered, in my opinion, a brilliant response: An agile approach, using sprints to show progress and wins, allows leaders to build momentum through small, visible victories. Speed is valuable - it gets you started quickly - but momentum is what sustains long-term results. By showing early wins, addressing immediate needs, and maintaining strong communication, people feel progress is being made. In the end, high levels of momentum combined with high levels of communication are what truly drive results.
Speed looks great in the moment. It’s visible, it’s measurable, and it plays well in boardrooms and quarterly reports. Speed is the sprint on day one - the 40 miles you cover when the conditions are good, the adrenaline is high, and everyone is watching.
But as Jim Collins and Morten Hansen illustrate in Great By Choice, speed without discipline rarely wins the long game. Their research into “10X companies”—those that beat their industry index by at least 10 times—showed that success wasn’t about charisma, luck, or bold moves. It was about fanatic discipline, empirical creativity, and productive paranoia. Above all, it was about a relentless commitment to the 20-Mile March.
The 20-Mile March metaphor is drawn from the 1911 race to the South Pole. Two explorers - Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott - set out under nearly identical conditions. Amundsen led his team with disciplined consistency, moving 15–20 miles every day, no matter the weather. Even on clear, calm days when they could have doubled their pace, he throttled back, knowing that overextension would cost them later.
Scott, by contrast, pushed hard on the good days and collapsed on the bad. He sprinted when conditions were favorable, then sat idle in his tent when storms blew in. The outcome was tragic: Amundsen’s team planted their flag first and returned safely. Scott and his men perished.
That is the difference between speed and momentum. Speed gets you out of the gate. Momentum - measured, disciplined, consistent progress - gets you home alive.
Break big visions or strategic plans into smaller 20-Mile marches. Each daily march delivers visible wins that show stakeholders progress is happening while building the underlying momentum that sustains change.
Sustainable performance doesn’t come from bursts of heroics but from disciplined systems of continuous improvement. High-performance teams thrive not because they move the fastest in the short term, but because they communicate well, celebrate incremental wins, and hold each other accountable to the march.
Speed may deliver optics, but momentum delivers outcomes. Momentum builds trust. Momentum steadies the team in storms. Momentum compounds into sustainable performance that outlasts shareholder cycles and quarterly pressures.
As leaders, our mandate is not to choose between speed or momentum, but to know when each serves us. Speed gets us started. Momentum keeps us going. The companies that thrive, like Amundsen’s expedition and the 10X organizations Collins studied, are those that keep marching - every day, through storms and sunshine alike.
Watch clip of Speed vs. Momentum:
