Theory of Incremental Advantage

Minutes Decided the Credit for the Release of the Iranian Hostages

The Iranians who held the remaining 51 Americans hostage in January 1981 insisted on waiting until a few minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President of the United States before releasing the hostages who had been held in captivity for 444 days. These few minutes deprived President Carter of the credit for winning the hostages' release and left a lingering cloud over his presidency. These few minutes provided a huge boost to President Reagan's popularity and political momentum.

The Importance of Deadlines

Deadlines are an effective time-management technique. Deadlines are a check on perfectionism; create a sense of urgency; accelerate the pace of work; force prioritization; and, force allies to act. As Nobel prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling has pointed out, one of the problems in negotiations is convincing the other side that you are serious; otherwise, negotiations and disputes can drag out endlessly. Setting a deadline can increase the credibility of commitments.

The best managers give their employees deadlines. They don’t simply say “Accomplish the goal as soon as possible.” In the early 1960s, President Kennedy declared his goal of putting a man on the moon before 1970. This goal was achieved when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon on July 20, 1969.

Completing your project on time is important, if only because inefficiency on your part can be contagious. Even the overachievers in your group might slack off when they realize you are not dealing successfully with your own deadlines. In addition, missing a deadline may mean that all of the time, energy, and resources you spent on a project were wasted.

The best way to schedule a project is by working backwards from the project’s due date to the present. You must decide which milestones you need to arrive at as the timeline progresses.

The Hungarian Revolt of 1956 Was Ill-Timed

The Hungarian Revolt of 1956 could have been successful if its timing were more propitious. It was ill-timed because it occurred in the midst of a U.S. presidential election and a political crisis in the Middle East.

Inventors Secure Valuable Patents Just Hours Before Their Competitors

On February 14, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell filed an application covering “the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal sounds telegraphically” with the U.S. Patent Office. Two hours later that same day, Elisha Gray filed a patent on a device that would send speech by wire.

By that two-hour gap, Bell became the first person to register a claim for a patent on the telephone. U.S. Patent No. 174,465 eventually became known as “the single most valuable patent ever issued in the history of the world”.

Bell was fascinated with the mechanics of speech from a very young age as his mother was deaf. When he was 19, he realized that there was a relationship between vowel sounds and musical notes. His research of the use of tuning forks led him to the discovery of German physicist, Hermann von Helmholtz. As Bell told the story, his unfamiliarity with the German language resulted in a "very valuable blunder." Helmholtz had devised the means of reproducing vowel sounds by running an intermittent electric current to an electromagnet situated near tuning forks, which it caused to vibrate. Struggling to real Helmholtz's German, Bell concentrated on the illustrations the physicist included in his book On the Sensations of Tone. He concluded mistakenly that Helmholtz had transmitted vowels by telegraph. Helmholtz had made no such claim, but Bell later claimed that had he understood that, "I might never have commenced my experiments."

The History of the World Has Been Decided in Mere Seconds

Pivotal points in history are decided in seconds.

• In the summer of 1930—over two years before his seizure of power in Germany—a car in which Hitler was riding in the right front passenger seat collided with a heavy trailer truck. The truck braked just in time to avoid running over Hitler’s car and crushing him. Because of the degree to which Hitler’s psychopathology determined Nazi policy and success, World War II and the resulting reshaping of Europe would probably have been quite different if the truck driver had braked one second later.
• The Israeli attack on Iraq’s nuclear power facility on June 7, 1981 was timed down to the few seconds when the Iraqi guards were changing shifts. Had this attack not been so exquisitely timed, Iraq would probably have had a nuclear bomb today.