Everything—everything—about the modern corporation depends on speed. This can be measured simply by how fast it turns customer information into cash. Size, scope, products, technology are all helpful but never determinative. Cash velocity is destiny.

Moreover, high cash velocity companies are like vacuum pumps: irrespective of their size, they suck all the profits out of their markets.

What does all this have to do with a soccer ball? Curiously, firms that have high velocities of information actually look like soccer balls. That is, they function by having all their assets and operations are on the surface, as it were, where they face customers directly.

By scoring companies against a common velocity standard comprised of two measures, cash and capital velocity, you can rank your company against any in the world, no matter how unalike in market, products, or customers.

Management can import lessons from one industry of any size anywhere in the world directly into another. The lessons of retail can be applied to IC manufacturing. Our management scoring system is, therefore, the great leveler of modern management.

Moreover, our data show that low velocity companies could invent the next Google and it would do them no good. High cash velocity is the necessary condition for all accretive innovation. The same holds true in M&A—look at what happened to deadweights Daimler and Chrysler—and in large-scale organic growth initiatives—all of Japan for the last two decades.

Cash velocity is destiny. You have it or you don’t.