When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

by Daniel H. Pink

A decade later, a scholar named Connie Gersick was beginning to study another organism (human beings) in its natural habitat (conference rooms). She tracked small groups of people working on projects—a task force at a bank developing a new type of account, hospital administrators planning a one-day retreat, university faculty and administrators designing a new institute for computer science—from their very first meeting to the moment they reached their final deadline. Management thinkers believed that teams working on projects moved gradually through a series of stages—and Gersick believed that by videotaping all the meetings and transcribing every word people uttered she could understand these consistent team processes in a more granular way.