InsightsWhy the Tortoise Doesnt Win Anymore: Speed to Skill as a Competitive AdvantageMark Marone, PhDAugust 18, 2025Richard Drury/Getty ImagesIn brief:In a fast-changing market, sustainable advantage comes from how quickly organizations can identify skill needs, acquire them, and apply them in real timebefore the competitive landscape shifts again.Firms like Google, OpenAI, and Unilever integrate learning directly into work, leveraging data, rapid iteration, and internal mobility to create a continuous cycle of skill acquisition, application, and impact.Accelerating speed to skill requires more than faster trainingit demands strategic alignment on future skills, psychologically safe environments to apply them, and performance metrics that reward learning agility.For 2,000 years, the fable The Tortoise and the Hare has offered a lesson in patience and persistence. Slow and steady wins the race, the story goes. Deliberate, methodical progress beats speed.But in todays business landscape, that moral increasingly feels outdated.Welcome to an era where speed to skillhow quickly individuals and organizations can learn, adapt, and apply new capabilitieshas become a defining competitive advantage. In fact, it may be the only sustainable competitive advantage left. The new race is to see who learns fastest, applies that learning in real time, and gets maximum ROI before the landscape and the skills needed to navigate it shift again.The Hare Learns a LessonIn the classic tale, the hare loses. The advantage of his natural speed is undermined by his arrogance and complacency. But imagine a different version: one where the hare has learned his lesson and recognizes there is no time for napping under a tree. Instead, he scans the terrain for the best way forward, learns from every misstep, and uses those lessons immediately to move ahead, smarter and faster.Thats todays winning strategy in business. Companies are now consciously improving their speed to skill, making them more agile and adaptive. And theyre pulling away from competitors, even those making slow but steady progress.Institutionalizing Learning at SpeedOn the cutting edge are companies like Google and OpenAI, which approach learning like an extreme sport. OpenAI, for example, has built systems that treat every launch as a learning opportunity. Nearly 100% of releases are A/B tested, and those insights feed back into rapid cycles of iteration, dramatically increasing what some call their learning velocity.At Google, speed to skill is also measured with surgical precision, especially on engineering teams. Through its DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) framework, Google tracks how long it takes teams to deploy new code, recover from failures, and iterate changes. These metrics reflect how fast teams learn from the real world and integrate that learning into the product.Speed to Skill at ScaleLearning velocity isnt limited to tech companies. Unilever has become a global model for what it means to build speed to skill at scale. Through its internal talent marketplace, employees can map their own career paths and identify the skills theyll need. They can access relevant learning and apply their new capabilities immediately by volunteering for short-term internal gigs. For instance, a marketing professional can learn basic data analysis and then test that skill in a data-driven project in a time frame of just weeks.This integration of learning, doing, and performing creates a virtuous cycle: faster skill acquisition, faster application, and a faster impact on the business. Its no coincidence that Unilever consistently ranks among the most future-ready global companies.Why This Matters NowThe half-life of skills is shrinking, quickly. The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2027 44% of workers core skills will be disrupted. AI is transforming job roles at a pace that is making some training programs obsolete before they can be completed.And the pressure for speed is mounting. According to our 2025 Fast, Fluid, and Future-Focused study, 55% of organizations say that incorporating gen AI, AI, or machine learning into business practices is a top priority this year. It follows that nearly half also said there are significantly increased expectations of leaders to upskill their teams in AI.Faster training delivery alone isnt the full solution to the problem of accelerating speed to skill. Organizations must first understand the skills they will need, something that must go hand in hand with setting strategy. Second, the training must be effective and applicable. Third, it all needs to happen within an organizational culture that embraces the application of new skillsa change-seeking organization. It is a task for which many business leaders and organizations arent fully prepared.A New Moral for a New RaceSo whats the takeaway for business leaders?The lesson isnt that speed always wins. Its that learning speed wins in a world that rewards insight, agility, and action.If youre a leader, ask yourself:Is learning embedded in our C-suite strategy discussions?How quickly can our teams integrate new technologies, tools, or processes? How do we know?Knowing our strategy, do our people have the opportunity to help identify the skills they are going to need?Does our leadership create a psychologically safe environment that is conducive to applying new skills?Are our performance measurements and incentives aligned with accelerating our organizations learning velocity?To compete in this new race, organizations must design for speed to skill. Its not just about training programs but also systems and environments that make learning continuous, contextual, and integral to performance.When it comes to learning, its time to retire the old fable. The new one is being written every day by companies that are learning their way to the finish linefaster than ever before.Leadership DevelopmentStrategic AlignmentShare this resourceShare on LinkedInShare on FacebookShare on XShare on WhatsAppEmail this PageConnect with usChange isnt easy, but we can help. 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