The Deadline Effect-Christopher Cox

Book: The Deadline Effect
Author: Christopher Cox
Publisher: Simon & Schuster India

What is your take on deadlines?

The Deadline Effect by Christopher Cox looks at the impact deadlines have on us, and how we can use them to deliver the best results for all parties. Social scientists have revealed that most negotiations run right up to the deadline before a deal is finally struck. What they also discovered was that this deadline effect usually results in a worse deal for both parties. Cox shows you how, instead, the deadline effect can be used to bring about success not failure. Based on his own experience as a magazine commissioning editor, where coaxing writers to deliver on time is an art form, he also embeds himself in other businesses, such as a ski patrol ahead of the first day of the winter season, to see how they meet deadlines that cannot be missed.

When we look at non-fiction books, they usually tend to be preachy, but this one moves almost like a case study, rather than a book that tells you what works and what doesn’t. Taking the examples of some seemingly unrelated industries and setups, Christopher goes on to show how deadlines can be an effective tool to extract the best in the people and processes. I loved how the book is clearly divided into sections, each one talking about a separate case, and how deadlines were managed in that scenario. Another aspect I liked was that Christopher uses primary data and puts himself in the scenarios to experience the impact of the strategies and that shows that the concept he is talking about is easy to learn and implement. As a person who has focused on project management for specialization, I found out that the concepts he has given are easy to implement, and personally, I feel that I did take away some points which I would love to implement in my workplace.

Christopher’s writing is gripping and keeps the reader glued to the page, and he has a knack of telling a story so as to keep a person hooked to what he is saying. The research for the book is quite detailed and as we journey through the examples, we see that each of them have been researched, experienced, and then written about, and there are extremes to what Christopher has gone to get his content. The last chapter felt a bit rushed to me, and I would have loved a bit more of fluidity in that, but overall, it is good.

This is a book I would highly recommend to people who work on things that usually have close deadlines, and more specifically to people who are looking to build careers in Project Management or Consulting, for this gives an interesting peek into what a person is getting into when you are put into a high-pressure situation. The book scores a 4.31/5 for me.

Thank you, Simon & Schuster India, for providing a media copy in exchange for an honest review.

Get a copy of the book on Amazon India here.