Stanford Business

NOVEMBER 2006


About This Issue

The Value of Time and Timing

Kathleen O'Toole, Editor
Kathleen O'Toole
Editor

Long before there were high-rise office buildings and PowerPoint presentations, aides to a British Foreign Legion officer and a chieftain somewhere in the far-flung Empire arranged a business meeting for their bosses at a crossroads at noon the next day. When the chieftain had not shown up by one o’clock, the officer demanded to know why. To the chieftain’s aides the answer was obvious: Had not the officer noticed that clouds covered the sun at noon that day?

As someone who grew up on a farm with the phrase “Make hay while the sun shines,” I found the chieftain’s reasoning quite logical. But the anthropologist who told this story at an academic conference on the subject of time was trying to make a different point: Clocks permitted people to coordinate not just with nature but with other people, and that led to enormous productivity gains once everyone bought into the clock’s authority.

Coordinating our time comes so easily today that we don’t often think about the differences in time perspective that still exist. This issue of our magazine seems to want to call attention to time—both the importance of timing your life and the role of luck and life events in changing your plans.

Take for example Bill Browder, MBA ’89, who happened to graduate the year the Berlin Wall fell, not an incidental factor in his success in Eastern Europe and Russia. But he also made some of his own luck by becoming very good at timing the press.

Similarly, the alums who founded MercadoLibre in Argentina had the good luck to be at the Business School at a time when internet business ideas were flowing like water. But Hernan Kazah and Marcos Galperin, both MBA ’99, also timed their venture so as not to burn through their financing before enough South Americans had access to the internet.

Thanks to Professor Paul Oyer, we also read about economists and Stanford MBAs whose careers are partly the result of luck. Their incomes and credentials correlate with whether or not they happened to graduate in bear or bull markets.

A longer time perspective is required for some projects. Take the example of Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, Sloan ’95. A politician trying to work within the framework of Palestine’s fledgling democracy, he is grateful for the “time to think” away from the trauma of the Middle East that the Sloan Master’s Program provided him in 1994-95.

And finally, Esther Koch, MBA ’79, warns baby-boomers that their time perspective will shift as they age. As her mother approaches the end of her life, Koch learns to prefer shared “moments of joy” over multi-tasking.

May your time spent with this magazine be educational, fun, or escapist. If it inspires you to arrange a meeting with a long-lost classmate, be sure to plan what happens if Google Earth gives you the wrong coordinates and a radio tower blocks your cell phones from synching.

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