When: The Art of Perfect Timing

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Sequence

Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once.

—John Wheeler¹

Picture yourself pouring water through a funnel. If all the water tried to escape the small end of the funnel at the same time, the result would be chaos, like a crush of people trying to exit a movie theater after someone yells “Fire!”A funnel works because gravity and other forces gently encourage the water molecules to get in line, a line that becomes a fast-moving spiral. When we look at a funnel we see its shape, and we understand its function. What we don't think about is the underlying, and often invisible, timing mechanism that makes it work: sequence.

In business, as in life more generally, we control and manipulate most easily what we can ...