Can business leaders, entrepreneurs, and innovators enhance their innate sense of timing to help them make more attuned and impactful decisions? From the launch of a new product or service to diversifying, innovating or shifting strategy, business success is often ascribed to chance or luck – but what about expert timing? Mastering timing is a challenging skill that requires patience, persistence, resilience, and adaptability. Musicians and artists, with their well-developed sense of timing and flexibility, offer valuable insights that can be applied to the business world to help bridge the gap between the theoretical understanding of timing and its practical application.

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Timing is everything in business—but how do business leaders determine when to announce a new appointment or strategic business opportunity? Recently-published research provides insights from an unexpected field – the world of music. The first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary study – a collaboration between Henley Business School and Berklee College of Music – found that musicians have honed an innate sense of timing that helps them make better music, and suggests that this is a skill set that could be gained by business practitioners too, under the right conditions.

When we talk about timing in terms of business, we need look no further than Apple founder Steve Jobs. His company has become one of the biggest tech companies worldwide, and timing has played a large part. Jobs said in 2008, “These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you’re going to surf. If you choose unwisely, then you can waste a lot of energy.”

Timing research is well-established in business management. Product entry timing – when to enter a market with a new product, with its advantages and drawbacks for first-movers – is one of the most active research areas in management and marketing; while action, attention, and timing are also important for identifying the optimal time-cost curve in business model innovation. However, the underlying principles of timing and how to acquire timing skills have remained elusive.

According to the Collins Dictionary, timing is defined as: “The skill or action of judging the right moment in a situation or activity at which to do something.”

How business leaders can hone this sense of timing and use it as a skill in decision-making is one of the key questions in a new first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary research study. The collaboration between Henley Business School and Berklee College of Music looked at musicians and how they use their sense of timing in music, finding insights for business leaders. Published in 2024, our research is titled Timing Matters: Applying Musicians’ Insights to Business, offering fascinating cutting-edge and cross-disciplinary insights.

Good timing is a skill that can be learned

Our research focused on eight professional contemporary musicians and their shared and extensive lived experience of timing in music. They were asked about their definition of timing, and how it affected them artistically and professionally. As one participant in the study said, “Self-reflecting is a very important part of knowing when to strike and when not to strike in life.”

This refers to the precision and coordination required in musical timing. Even when it feels fluid and improvised, it can be due to good timing, the result of placing the right notes in the right spaces. This demonstrates how being at the right place at the right time is important. We found that musicians have an intuitive grasp of timing, and the better the musician, the more likely they are to use timing effectively. Crucially, this appears to be a skill that can be honed over time, which opens up a whole new perspective on timing as a skill set.

Our study also looked at chronobiology and cognitive neuroscience to understand how musicians’ brain functioning might differ from non-musical individuals. This links to other research which shows that the brains of musicians adapt with development in the basal ganglia, and cerebellar connections as well as in the outer structure of the cortex. Sound and music stimulation fortifies neural networks and creates new pathways in the brain.

But how can this help business leaders make better decisions—or specialise their timing skills? The study explores this question at length. It refers to ways of listening and tapping into environments—much as a musician listens to the rest of his band or the orchestra to determine when to begin playing. As a respondent says, “If you’re the conductor, you’ve got both your ears on that [the right timing] but at the same time, you are leading it. You’re the one in charge of timing, they all look to you for timing. They all look to you for their cues, and you’ve got to hear it.”

Managing time more effectively

This is where business leaders can take note. As the conductor of their teams and organisations, they manage the groups they are in charge of. They are essentially controlling the right timing for support and collaboration, for developing products and services. They need to listen to every member of their team to understand the effect it might have on the project.

Timing in music is the ability to stay synchronised and maintain rhythm and tempo while performing in a group setting. It is not only a mechanical but also an expressive process, where a performer places the right notes and beats in the right places at the right moments to create the optimal musical experience. This ability to use timing expressively differentiates skilled musicians from novices and influences the audience’s positive or negative perception of a performance.

Our research suggests that to develop good timing, people can start by paying closer attention to what is happening around them. Musicians develop deep listening skills, which, with practice, allow them to intuitively understand where the beats can be placed ahead or pushed back to create the right ‘vibe’, the groove that gets everyone in tune. Musicians alter their perception of timing, based on what’s happening around them. We call this the ‘elasticity of timing’.

This can help managers lead their operations holistically rather than chronologically or linearly, recognising both seen and unforeseen business opportunities and creating moments to breathe without slowing down or accelerating without rushing.

 Is it luck—or timing?

Take the example of global online retail giant Amazon, which created the world’s first online bookstore in 1995. The company gained brand recognition and built a strong and loyal consumer following, eventually diversifying into products and services, and becoming the world’s largest online retailer in 2023. Despite recording initial losses, founder Jeff Bezos knew the time was right for the online retailer and could stay the course, growing the company into the giant it is today.

Bezos has credited ‘luck’ for his success at Amazon, but he also got the timing right. He has told how shortly after graduating from Princeton, he saw web usage growing 2,200% a year and realised that if he wanted to start a company, he’d have to hit the ground running.

Timing skills are trainable and can be practised. Like musicians practise their music, business leaders need to practise creating the right conditions for good timing. This means understanding the market they are in, the way customers are changing, and being able to respond to what is happening in their sector. Musicians are constantly listening ‘further ahead’ and exposing themselves to every possible musical opportunity. It is the same in business, timing is about dealing with uncertainty, and our research suggests that leaders can, like musicians, anticipate what’s ahead if they have in-depth knowledge and expertise about their area. They can then proactively create the conditions that allow them to respond to opportunities as they present themselves.

Business leaders must delve deeper into the concept of timing and recognise that timing influences many elements of business management that lead to success. As the great US leader Thomas Jefferson is rumoured to have said, ‘I find the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.’

The research report ‘Timing Matters: Applying Musicians’ Insights to Business’ authored by Van Zyl and Seol is part of a larger initiative called the ‘Theory of Groove’. Theory of Groove is a three-way collaboration between Barry Van Zyl, Ray Seol and Toki Wright, chair of the professional music department at Berklee College of Music, that explores a new framework for defining what groove means in everyday life and how it can be applied in various fields to enhance human activities. Wright, Seol and Van Zyl have also developed and delivered a series of workshops, benefiting both musicians and business leaders by helping them understand and apply their own version of groove, and a book manuscript is in preparation.