再No rush, July 7th 2012 P61 先送り賛美
(前略) Life is getting trickier for time wasters. Businesses that depend on just-in-time delivery cannot tolerate lateness. Stockmarkets trade millions of shares every minute. Twenty-four-hour news channels bombard us with information. Blogs and tweets provide a blizzard of instant comment. The situation is so dire that a quarter of Americans eat fast food every day. Employers are getting better at squeezing out timd-wasting. O Desk, an American firm that links employers with freelances over the internet, boasts that its software gives buyers an ゛unpresedented ability゛to monitor the people they hire. Last year the Tokyo Stock Exchange shortened its lunch break from a leisurely 90 minutes to 60. High-tech companies such as Google and Hewlett-Packard used to pride themselves on giving their employees time to pursue their own projects. Now they are either cutting back on ゛tinkering time゛or policing it more carefully. And employees are policing themselves： digital tools such as Rescue Time allow you to ration your access to the internet or to incoming e-mail. Compensation is becoming more short-term. The proportion of Americas who are paid by the hour has been rising since the 1970s. Today 59% of Americans (including professionals such as lawyers) are paid by the hour. But is it wise to be so obsessed with speed? High-speed trading can lead to market meltdowns, as almost happened on May 6th 2010, unless automatic breaks are installed. And is taking one's time so bad? Regulators are always warning people not to buy things in the heat of the moment. Procrastinators have a built-in cooling-off period. Businesses are forever saying that they need more creativity. Dithering can help. Ernest Hemingway told a fan who asked him how to write a novel that the first thing to do was to clean the fridge. Steven Johnson, a writer on innovation, argues that some of the best new products are ゛slow hunches゛. Nestle's idea of selling coffee in small pods went nowhere for three decades；now it is worth billions. These thoughts have been inspired by two (slowly savoured) works of management theory：an obscure article in the Academy of Management Journal by Brian Gunia of John Hopkins University；and a popular new book, ゛Wait：The Art and Science of Delay゛, by Frank Partnoy of San Diego University. Mr Gunia and his three co-authors demonstrated, in a series of experiments, that slowing down makes us more ethical. When confronted with a clear choice between right and wrong, people are five times more likely to do the right thing if they have time to think about it than if they are forced to make a snap decision. Organisations with a ゛fast pulse゛(such as banks) are more likely to suffer from ethical problems than those that move more slowly. (The current LIBOR scandal engulfing Barclays in Britain supports this idea.) The authors suggest that companies should make greater use of ゛cooling-off periods゛or introduce several levels of approval for important decisions. Mr Partnoy argues that too many people fail to recognise what good public speakers and comedians all understand：that success depends on knowing when to delay, and for how long. The important thing is not to do things first but to do them right. And doing them right often involves taking a bit more time. It's Just Lunch, a dating agency for professionals, prevents customers from judging each other on first impressions by not allowing them to post their photos on its website. Warren Buffett, the world's most successful investor, holds stocks for the long term rather than churning them. He writes that：゛lethargy bordering on sloth remains the cornerstone of our investment style.゛ Fabius Maximus, a Roman general nicknamed ゛The Delayer゛, wore Hannibal's invading army down by avoiding pitched battles. (後略)
