“Under-promise, Over-deliver” is often credited to Tom Peters, who used it as a heading in Thriving on Chaos in 1987. Two years earlier Gifford Pinchot III had written in Intrapreneuring: “Rather than promote the wonders of your project, do just the reverse: underpromise and overdeliver.”
The advice is to set the stated commitment at a level that can be kept.
In July 2015 the center DeAndre Jordan verbally agreed to a four-year, $80 million contract with the Dallas Mavericks. During the league’s eight-day moratorium, a handshake agreement was the only deal allowed.
Within days Jordan had second thoughts. He ignored repeated calls and texts from the team’s owner Mark Cuban and the player Chandler Parsons. Cuban wrote that Jordan “never responded to me at all yesterday. Not once.” Jordan re-signed with the Los Angeles Clippers and apologized: “I am sorry to have a change of heart.”
Asked about the moratorium, Cuban said: “Until you get him to sign on the line that is dotted, nothing happens.”
PolitiFact tracked 533 of Barack Obama’s campaign promises over two elections. Each promise received its own rating: Promise Kept, Compromise, Stalled, In the Works or Promise Broken. Promises that were too vague were left out.
In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey describes trust as an emotional bank account. “Keeping a commitment or a promise is a major deposit: breaking one is a major withdrawal.”
Covey goes further. “In fact, there’s probably not a more massive withdrawal than to make a promise that’s important to someone and then not come through.”
Trustworthy is the first point of the Scout Law. American Scouts learn its meaning in two short sentences: “Tell the truth and keep promises. People can depend on you.”
The Boy Scouts of America adopted the law in 1910, close to Baden-Powell’s British original of 1908, whose first point read: “A Scout’s honour is to be trusted.”
In Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hatches the Egg, published by Random House in 1940, a bird named Mayzie asks Horton the elephant to sit on her egg while she takes a short break. She never comes back.
Horton stays on the nest through bad weather, mockery, hunters, a sea voyage and a circus. His refrain: “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent!”
In the Seinfeld episode “The Alternate Side,” first aired on December 4, 1991, Jerry arrives at a car rental counter. He has a reservation, but there is no car.
“See, you know how to take the reservation, you just don’t know how to hold the reservation. … And that’s really the most important part of the reservation, the holding. Anybody can just take them.”
In 2014 Ayelet Gneezy of UC San Diego and Nicholas Epley of Chicago Booth published “Worth Keeping but Not Exceeding.” In one experiment each participant was paired with a volunteer who promised to solve 10 puzzles. Some volunteers secretly solved 5 or 15 instead.
Participants valued a kept promise more highly than a broken one. A promise exceeded made them no happier than a promise kept. Participants did not notice the extra effort.
Merriam-Webster gives an informal sense of flake out: “to fail or neglect to do or participate in something previously scheduled, agreed upon, or assigned.” An example from CBS News: a seller wants “to be certain that the buyer will consummate the transaction and not flake out.”
Starting in 2009, Barack Obama promised: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” PolitiFact counted 37 times when he said it with no caveats. In late 2013 at least 3.5 million Americans received notices that their plans were canceled.
On November 7, 2013, Obama told NBC News: “I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me.” In December PolitiFact named the promise its Lie of the Year for 2013.