I have zero military background but the “on time is five minutes late” rule makes total sense to me. I am rarely late and often early. Large meetings that routinely start 5 – 10 minutes late are my personal enemy. Large meetings are often a bad idea, but if there are 12 people on a call and you show up 5 minutes late you wasted a bunch of folks time.
Seth Godin, typically, has a good take on people who are often late.
They don’t want to be late. In fact, their good intentions are probably the reason that they are late. They might try one technique or another, and even apologize for being late, and yet it happens again.
There is one reason and one amplifying factor.
The amplifying factor is that when they’re late, people wait for them.
You might notice that things that leave on time (commuter trains, airplanes, live TV shows etc) almost never have a crowd of people showing up five or ten minutes late cursing out the system. For those things, the things that are known to leave on time, they manage to show up. That’s because their good intentions are not welcome here.
If the meeting starts at 10:00 start it at 10:00…
(If you want the one reason, click the link)
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 