Don't Rush
If you try and work twice as hard to reach an advantage, you will lose big time. The reason is that your leaders will be too weary from the journey to really stand up and fight. Sun Tzu said it like this, “Thus, if you order your men to roll up their buff-coats, and make forced marches without halting day or night, covering double the usual distance at a stretch doing a hundred LI in order to wrest an advantage, the leaders of all your three divisions will fall into the hands of the enemy.” Everybody knows that working to exhaustion is not effective. People will make more mistakes and once they get close to arriving, they will be in peril.
The other problem is that as you rush, you will lose your supplies. The baggage-train is what Sun Tzu called it. Without food supplies and other necessary supplies you are at a huge disadvantage. It doesn't make sense to run like crazy, be really tired, and have no supplies. The advantage will not be worth it. It is a much better strategy to use a smaller force as bait and get the enemy to come and fight on your terms.
In business, many companies get overstretched. They may work really fast and use up all their credit resources to reach an important goal. The only way the company can survive is if everything goes well all the time. There is no margin of safety. Sooner or later, the company will make mistakes. Tired leaders will quit or give up. There will be employees that resent being forced to run so quickly and will sabotage the enterprise. It makes much more sense to go a speed that is comfortable and one in which resources will be abundant. In that way, fresh and well rested employees with resources will be much more competitive than overtired and worn out employees with no resources.
The farther you go in rushing people, the more leaders will be lost and the least amount of employees that will make it. If you think you can run too fast, what you will actually do is lose most of your employees and most, if not all, of your leaders.
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