Given the title of my blog, The Death of Time, I think the first entry should answer the question: what does that mean? So, here goes.

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First of all, I read Einstein when I was a philosophy major (George Washington University, BA 1967). I didn’t read much of Einstein, and probably even less than I was assigned. I remember understanding very little. But I was very struck by the thought that time and space weren’t separate from each other. I also thought that it would take generations until the human fully incorporated that understanding of time and space into the way they saw the world not unlike the way it took generations to shift the human world view from an earth-centric universe to one where the earth is just another big rock in an incredibly vast universe. I have tried but cannot really imagine how the world will look to people who have an Einsteinian view of the world. But I do buy the concept that ultimately the human will deal with time distinctly different from how we deal with time now. And that is the same as saying that as the new view of time and space emerges, our current concept of time will die.

But that is not the death of time that really concerns me. I am more intrigued by how time is dying in terms of its importance to business. Time became important when the world moved from an agrarian to a manufacturing economy. In the agrarian economy, ‘time’ was important as a repeating cyclical pattern of weather and lengths of days. But with the manufacturing economy, the workplace moving indoors and the creation of accurate clocks, time became the primary measure to determine cost. Efficiency became measured by the amount of total time it took to get something done and workers became remunerated by how much time they spent on the job and how productive they could be with their time. The time clock became ubiquitous in factories and time sheets became ubiquitous at professional services firms, such as lawyers, accountants and communications firms.

Just as sacrosanct concepts died and arose in the transition from the agrarian to manufacturing economy, so will current sacrosanct concepts die as we move from the manufacturing economy to the knowledge economy – a move that is happening now, at an increasingly rapid pace, and globally but not universally. I believe that among the current sacrosanct concepts that will die is: ‘Time is money.’ I also believe that concept will be replaced by a new sacrosanct concept: Time may be money, but value is more money. Qorvis has been built on the latter premise. Instead of selling the commodity of time, our clients pay us for the value we provide them by our thinking and our execution. So whereas we do use various ways to measure value, we do not use any way to measure how we spend our time. We do not care. We have tested this premise, rethought more and more details, based all important decisions on this core belief, and ended up creating a successful enterprise by any measure. And we have done thatin a very short period of time compared to other companies.

I believe that both God and the devil are in the details. Ultimately, the success of Qorvis is attributable to all the small activities of each person at Qorvis every day of the week. But when asked to identify the single most important reason for our success, it is not difficult: we’ve eliminated the dominance of time. Not reduced it. We’ve killed it.

There are a number of other ideas and events that interest me, and I will be writing about them here as well, I imagine. But, as I am starting out with this effort, I think the theme that will drive much of what I write will be the idea of the death of time and what that means. I do not think the Qorvis success is an aberration. I think it is a case history of a new business model for the knowledge economy. I know it works for a communications firm. I think it would work just as well, maybe better, for other professional services firms. I also know that every attorney with whom I have ever discussed this business model loves it and, despite their intellectual buy-in, is afraid to try it. I think that those who adopt it will have the opportunity to emerge as new leaders in their space. The current Dows will be overtaken by new Bloombergs that seemingly come out of nowhere.

In 2000, the simple premise of eliminating time from the communications business was the shared idea that Michael Petruzzello and I shared with enough passion to want to build a business on it. We were joined then and subsequently, and continue to be joined by exceptional people. We now have about 8 years of experience with this model. Here in this blog, I’ll share much of that experience and what we’ve learned.