preface

Conventional wisdom suggests that any attempt to understand timing is futile. No one, it is said, can time the market or credibly predict the future. The world is too complex. There are too many unknowns. Every situation is different in some important way that makes past experience an imperfect guide. Moreover, sometimes getting the timing right is just a matter of luck, being in the right place at the right time with the right product or service. There is an element of truth in all of these observations. But the view that we cannot acquire skill in matters of timing is not only overly pessimistic; it is simply not true. With the right tools, we can be far better at managing and deciding issues of timing than conventional wisdom suggests. This book describes the nature of those tools and how to apply them.

For me, the key insight into issues of timing came in 2004. I was working in a makeshift office in my mother-in-law's apartment in São Paulo, Brazil. My wife and I were staying there as Dona Ella fought her final battle with cancer. A life was ending, and time was on my mind. Each morning, the cold winter sun would brighten the dark rosewood wall in our bedroom, and I would listen for the sound of the rooster that had always been present in past visits. But this year the rooster was silent. The last sounds of the city's rural past had vanished. In this apartment, where we had stayed during summers and Christmas vacations for more than thirty years, I discovered the concept of temporal architecture that forms the heart of this book. Although I didn't quite realize it at the time, this concept opened up a new way to approach the challenge of timing.

When I first began the study of timing in the spring of 1991, I made an explicit decision not to follow the norms of my profession. I am a professor in a business school, trained in the hard and social sciences. In contrast to the work of my colleagues, there was no “hypothesis” or explanation of “the facts” that I needed to test, no controlled experiments to run or large-scale surveys to administer. I didn't need a computer to “analyze the data” or build mathematical models. I didn't need statistics because there was nothing to count or measure. In short, I didn't need any of the sophisticated tools of modern social science. Instead, I went back to the time before they were invented. I became a hunter-gatherer.

I read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist cover to cover and clipped out every article, regardless of subject matter, that had anything to do with timing. I paid particular attention to timing errors: an action begun too soon or too late, a project unexpectedly delayed, and a sound business that, to everyone's surprise, collapsed overnight. In each case, I tried to determine how better timing could have improved the outcome.

I slowly began to create a classification system to keep track of the clippings I was acquiring, now over two thousand. This was not just an academic exercise. One reason we fail to see timing issues in advance is that we don't have a practical way to search for them. The best way to find anything is to give it a name and address within a known structure. That is what this book will do: give you a way to find, name, and address timing issues anywhere in your work and life.

While I was organizing this material, I began working with a number of companies. The issues were diverse. A business venture based on a new technology failed, and timing was clearly part of the reason. A company ended up in court over a broken contract, and, in my judgment, a better understanding of timing would have produced a different outcome. I worked with the owner of a company who was trying to decide whether to match the price structure of a competing firm. A timing analysis revealed that no action was needed: the problem would solve itself because of rapid changes in the industry.

Now that I could see how deeply timing was involved in so many aspects of business, I had to pause. The topic of timing seemed boundless. It had no center, no obvious beginning or end. It was also complex, because sometimes timing doesn't matter. Some things will succeed or fail regardless of when we act. So, for the first ten years, I wrote largely for myself. I put what became almost eight hundred pages of notes and analysis into a folder on my computer and labeled it A Book for My Own Use. In the course of writing those notes, I discovered that timing errors weren't random and that, because they weren't random, at least some of them could be prevented. As I got deeper into the subject, I discovered processes and phenomena that I hadn't seen before. In my work with companies, I found that the approach I was developing had immediate practical application.

Later, as I sat down to write what I discovered, I found myself facing the great irony of our time: no time. Busy people rarely have the time to read a book of any length or complexity, so I've condensed, cut, shortened. If you start this book as you board a transatlantic flight, you will have a good idea of what a timing analysis consists of by the time you land. And if your flight is delayed (as so often occurs), then you will have ample time to finish it. What better way to kill time than to read a book on timing?¹