Six Ways to Slow Down Smart

Now we can say, "Wait a minute. What's working and what's not? Where are we offering value? Where do we need to improve? What services are no longer relevant to our clients? What challenges demand our attention three months, six months, two years down the road?" It's a good time for every company to reconnect its bearings -- to be thoughtful and proactive. Most creative breakthroughs happen when you break for reflection.

For Schwab, slowing down starts with building customer relationships. We want to leverage our foray into the investment-advice business, because we want to provide more value to our clients than simply taking the next trade. Although our branches have been offering advice for the past two years, that kind of service takes time. Namely, you have to sit down with a client and make sure it happens. And working in a frenzied climate, we didn't necessarily have the time to let our clients know about our other services. In quieter times, however, we are reaching out more than ever to our clients and talking to them about their portfolios, their potential diversification strategies, and their financial objectives.

We're thinking harder about the way to run good business. For one thing, we're trying to get more synergy between different business units, so we can offer better service to our clients. We're also more focused on cost effectiveness. The truth is, when speed is paramount, you don't necessarily build processes for efficiency. There's a lot of duplication of efforts. So ask yourself, If I were going to completely redesign a process, what would I do differently? My bet is that most companies have a highly touted "best practice" of the past three years that could use serious tuning.

Think about it.

Beth Sawi oversaw the launch of Schwab.com in 1995, as the executive vice president of electronic brokerage at the time. Today, the company executes 81% of its trades online, accounting for nearly one out of every five electronic trades in the financial-services industry. Sawi, who joined the company in 1982, took a year-long sabbatical in Italy three years ago to write her book, Coming Up for Air: How to Build a Balanced Life in a Workaholic World (Hyperion Books, 2000).