She found the same dynamic over longer periods. In other research, she spent a year following a venture-capital-backed start-up company that she called M-Tech. Entire companies don’t have the finite lives or specific deadlines of small project teams. Yet she found that M-Tech “showed many of the same basic temporally regulated punctuational patterns as project groups show, on a more sophisticated, deliberate level.” That is, M-Tech’s CEO scheduled all the company’s key planning and evaluation meetings in July, the midpoint of the calendar year, and used what he learned to redirect M-Tech’s
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