I saw an ad today, for a well known enterprise application vendor's alliance with a chip company, that had the headline:
Those who know first, win
and all I could think of was how wrong this was. What good does knowing something before your competitors do if you don't act on? What if you know first but take so much longer to decide what to do than your competitors that they respond before you do?
This whole concept of decision latency being as important as the knowledge latency has come up a lot recently (in discussions of BI 2.0 and intelligent processes, in the context of CRM analytics and in the context of data warehouses). If you cannot reduce the time from when you could know what to do to the point where you actually do something then you are not going to win. So I would say
Those who act first, win (provided the action is smart enough)
