Delaying a decision or a response until the last possible minute is not such a bad idea after all. People do it all the time with some pretty good results. Take the deal sites, for instance — if a particular product is on auction, say, two seconds before the transaction time gets over, a buyer will appear out of nowhere and outbid the till-then highest bidder adding on a few hundred more. Then they’ll wait to figure if they are outbid; if they are, they start incrementing their bid. But because there is such a small window, there’s very little another bidder can really do about it other than crib.
You will see bidders who have failed to get the item they wanted vent their ire in the feedback section of the site concerned or on social networking sites in general. But the fact is, that’s the way the game is played. It’s kind of fun actually. And there’s a name for this as well — these guys are called auction snipers, who increase their chances of winning by last-minute bids. It’s been around for quite a while and if you care to look around, you will see top athletes and sports players following a variation of that strategy.
Think of Novak Djokovic who won his third consecutive Australian Open title last month. He has been described by sports writers as the master of escapology, a man who seems to wait till he finds himself in a completely hopeless situation before he unleashes the most destructive tennis on his opponent. Scientists who study the strategies of super fast athletes agree that Djokovic’s game is unique in that he seems to be able to wait a few milliseconds longer than his opponents before hitting the ball.
“Djokovic wins because he can procrastinate — at the speed of light,” Professor Frank Partnoy, law and finance professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, wrote in an essay for FT.com (“Waiting Game”). Partnoy has also studied the game of Jimmy Connors and says the tennis ace changed the game by waiting as long as possible before hitting a return shot, giving his brain more time to analyse where the ball was coming from and at what speed.
You could possibly relate all of this to the issue of “creative waiting” that artistes vouch for, where the moment of inspiration just dawns on them after a lot of hemming and hawing or simply waiting for it to dawn.
So, if you really think of it in the light of all this, speed seems like an overrated virtue in management literature. Slowing down is equated by authors with giving the competition the upper hand when it comes to innovation, allowing them the leeway to reach consumers with new ideas and products before you did. In the long run, it gives your competitors the opportunity to dominate the market, even with a sub-standard product, simply because they got there first. What’s worse, all this delay means that over a period you develop a reputation for being a follower rather than an industry leader.
If anything else, the advancements in technology have made the proponents of this particular school of thought even more vocal. The argument goes like this: there aren’t many technologies that are so unique that they can give one company a long-term edge over another. With technology offerings fairly standardised across the globe, and with information widely available across the World Wide Web, a company’s crown jewel trade secrets – whether it is systems or processes – will be difficult to hang onto for long. So, the only competitive advantage becomes the enterprise’s speed — of going from point A to point B faster than the rest of the crew.
This whole thing about speed, about being there before anyone else, also has a cascading effect on decision-making. Indeed, the ability to take quick decisions is regarded by many authors as the hallmark of an effective leader. They say you need leaders who can quickly assess the immensity of a situation, identify the most expedient and the most viable course of action, and then act quickly — often without having all the crucial information or the time to weigh every possible option and then choose the best way forward. Author Malcolm Gladwell (Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking) goes as far as to say spontaneous decisions are often as good as — or even better than — carefully planned and considered ones.
So, which is better—to speed up or slow down?
Let’s put it this way: Speed might seem right in the heat of competitive pressure, but poorly planned charges in the face of competitor fire is recipe for pure disaster. A smart leader is one who knows this. He also acknowledges the fact that people and teams go through periods of high productivity and periods of recovery and manages the work flow of his teams and their rhythm accordingly.
