Power (Also) Means Setting The Tempo For Everyone Else

Lessons from six books I’ve read recently.

The books are:

• Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan – “Regime Change: Inside The Imperial Presidency Of Donald Trump” – 2026 – 496 pages
• Roland Lazenby – “Magic: The Life Of Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson” – 2023 – 832 pages
• Jon McNeill – “The Algorithm: The Hypergrowth Formula That Transformed Tesla, Lululemon, General Motors, And SpaceX” – 2026 – 224 pages
• Shaquille O’Neal with Jackie MacMullan – “Shaq Uncut: My Story” – 2011 – 432 pages
• Gabriel Sherman – “Bonfire Of The Murdochs: How The Epic Fight To Control The Last Great Media Dynasty Broke A Family – And The World” – 2026 – 256 pages
• Geoff Woods – “The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI To Make Faster, Smarter Decisions” – 2024 – 304 pages

Part of the power wielded by the figures featured in these six books stems from their ability to deprive others of control over their own time. In this respect, speed and tempo are two different things. Dictating the tempo does not necessarily mean moving faster than everyone else: Magic Johnson speeds things up, Shaq slows them down, Donald Trump overwhelms, Rupert Murdoch shifts attention, and Elon Musk shortens cycles. What they have in common, then, is not speed but the temporal asymmetry they create, depriving their opponents of the ability to set their own pace.

The theory of the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) provides a framework for understanding this phenomenon. Developed by U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd, it suggests that, in combat, the advantage comes from operating at a tempo that disrupts the enemy’s decision-making cycle, regardless of the actual speed involved. The opponent is thereby forced into a reactive mode and gradually loses the ability to take the initiative.

We see the same dynamic in business: Some people believe that the more power they wield, the more entitled they are to treat other people’s time as a variable to be adjusted to suit their own priorities – and their own self-importance. They think they are making themselves more efficient, when in fact they are making the organization as a whole less efficient and more costly to run. They optimize their own time at everyone else’s expense.

My six recent reads offer three complementary ways of understanding this dynamic of power over time:

• Magic Johnson and Shaquille O’Neal dictate the tempo of action, but in opposite ways. Magic took control of time by accelerating the game, while Shaq did so by forcing everyone else to organize their play around his presence.
• Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch, meanwhile, dictate the rhythm of attention. Regular Superception readers will no doubt remember the phrase coined by Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist during his first term, to describe his media (and political) strategy: “Flood the zone with shit” (sic). The idea is to overwhelm the media with so much noise that journalists no longer know what to focus on or how to prioritize information, thereby disorienting the American public. Rupert Murdoch represents the other side of this effort to control the news cycle and is generally a willing accomplice to the would-be dictator in this regard.
• Finally, Jon McNeill and Geoff Woods show how business leaders can dictate the tempo of their organizations. The fourth component of the “algorithm” described by McNeill involves accelerating cycle times by challenging requirements, eliminating steps, and simplifying the processes involved. For Elon Musk, building a fast organization is not the same as simply speeding up an organization that is too slow. In a sense, his approach takes the concept of “time-based competition”, developed by the Boston Consulting Group in the late 1980s to establish time as a source of competitive advantage, to its logical extreme. Geoff Woods adds another dimension to these principles: Beyond industrial cycles, artificial intelligence compresses cognitive cycles, particularly by shortening the time between gathering information and making decisions.

To conclude, I want to return to the fascinating analysis Anthropic published of how its own systems operate. One of its findings is particularly striking: During interactive sessions, Claude agents spend approximately 80% of their time waiting for human input. Employees, in other words, become the primary bottleneck to agent productivity.

Tomorrow, the critical question will be who – humans or machines – sets the tempo at which organizations operate. Those that learn to harness the speed of machines without confusing the time required for algorithmic computation with the time needed for human judgment will likely enjoy the most decisive temporal advantage of all.