Surprising number of people on this thread are conflating first mover advantage with moving fast.
First mover just means you are first to a new market. Hypothetically, there could have been 10 years of product development behind your first mover advantage.
Moving fast, as I see it, is not becoming that huge, slow organization (think GE), that has so much bureaucracy baked-in nothing ever gets done.
Most decisions really don't require the level of debate they're given. The author is pointing out that a lot of the decision making process is influenced by shit that doesn't have anything to do with the actual decision.
The reason big, old organizations tend to have a lot of bureaucracy and process is that they created it in response to bad outcomes from lot of ill-considered fast decisions.
I don't think it has to be entirely responsive to a specific poor choice. At the company I worked at the bureaucracy increased hand in hand with the complexity of the system (paired with the departure of the original systems sages [who literally knew every specific of the aircraft on par with the design engineers]). Single persons could no longer see the effect of their decisions on the entirety of the system (and therefore needed to check with others via protocols etc). Cascade that a couple times (smart, ambitious people do not like filling out forms [in general]) and out pops a 20k employee company where no one knows anything except how to fill out form 108DB-A.
Also it should be considered that if a small business makes a lot of ill-considered, fast decisions, chances are they're no longer in business.
First mover just means you are first to a new market. Hypothetically, there could have been 10 years of product development behind your first mover advantage.
Moving fast, as I see it, is not becoming that huge, slow organization (think GE), that has so much bureaucracy baked-in nothing ever gets done.
Most decisions really don't require the level of debate they're given. The author is pointing out that a lot of the decision making process is influenced by shit that doesn't have anything to do with the actual decision.