ABSTRACT
When Peter Vaill became the Dean of a US Business School in the late 1970s he found out things about his organisation that he did not know had mattered as a management professor. Things like what? ‘As a Dean … I quickly learned’, he remarks, ‘that the good things that we management professors were saying managers should do are all time-dependent processes’ (Vaill, 1998, 28, italics in the original). Thus,
there was nothing I could do, I learned sometimes painfully, that did not have its own rhythms and pacings, pauses and accelerations, beginnings and endings. … Furthermore, there was the problem of the intrusiveness of events: things did not occur one at a time. … [A]t any moment I was flowing with the multiple, disjointed time streams of the various projects in which I was involved. … Another key characteristic of the temporally bound quality of my life as a manager was that I could not afford to be solipsistic about my projects as my time frames. No matter how prominent and important my projects and schedules were to me, I could not assume these matters had the same subjective prominence and importance to anyone else. … Everything was interactive. … I simply had to learn to understand myself in a spatiotemporal field of relationships, flowing and shifting.
