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Finding time for the future
A personal experience from the Chairman of Shaping Tomorrow
"Back in the 90's when I was CEO of a large and very successful financial services business we had determined our strategy and decided to sell the business before the market changed, as it now has. But we had bought twenty businesses and knew just how much work it would take to go through a full buyer search and subsequent transfer of engagements process. The team knew it had to continue to run a marathon but now have a heart transplant at the same time.
So, we hired a consultant to help us, and after observing us for a while he suggested we do a Short Interval Scheduling exercise. The Executive team, including myself, were asked to take a reading of what we were doing every five minutes of the day for one month and to capture the info on our mobile phones for uploading to a spreadsheet. A simple process but as you will see a highly effective one.
A waste of time
The results were staggering. We found that 70% of our time was wasted; yes wasted!
I have always been seen as an executive who is ruthless! Ruthless with time that is, not people. So imagine my shock when my results, even though the best of the team, still showed I could get 63% back by being smarter.
Making good use of time
It was a true tipping point for the team. We determined to set up the company with a shadow executive team to run the day-to-day as though they were us. We defined our expectations and left them very much to get on with it apart from monthly formal reviews ahead of the Board meeting. Otherwise all executive controls were ceded to them.
That left us as coaches and mentors to the shadow team and strategists on our sale.
We not only grew the next level down dramatically in the course of the next few months but proved that our sell by date as an Executive Team had come. Once the sale had been achieved, the team knew it would get bigger jobs with the purchaser and that the shadow team would take over.
The 60-70% productivity improvement produced such great primary and secondary benefits that when we were hostilely attacked during the sale we had the time and resources to defend, while the shadow team ran the business as usual.
So the message here is to challenge people who say they are too busy. How do they know? Where is their time going? What are they doing that they could drop in favour of becoming better strategic leaders? For in that switch is the key to the next promotion and further personal, organizational, and stakeholder success.
How about you? How could you manage your time more effectively for the benefit of all and spend more time in your future?
Feel free to quote me."
Next: Future Practices Back: Why Bother? To: Shaping Tomorrow
Copyright: Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
"Back in the 90's when I was CEO of a large and very successful financial services business we had determined our strategy and decided to sell the business before the market changed, as it now has. But we had bought twenty businesses and knew just how much work it would take to go through a full buyer search and subsequent transfer of engagements process. The team knew it had to continue to run a marathon but now have a heart transplant at the same time.
So, we hired a consultant to help us, and after observing us for a while he suggested we do a Short Interval Scheduling exercise. The Executive team, including myself, were asked to take a reading of what we were doing every five minutes of the day for one month and to capture the info on our mobile phones for uploading to a spreadsheet. A simple process but as you will see a highly effective one.
A waste of time
The results were staggering. We found that 70% of our time was wasted; yes wasted!
- Time was leaking on micro managing the business we had rescued from oblivion.
- We had not altered our success criteria to recognize that we should have given up lots of control to gain control as the business grew.
- We stayed in our comfort zones and didn't delegate as much as we could have.
- We attended meetings because we always had.
- We worked on things that had medium, not long-term strategic value.
- Consideration of the future beyond the next two years was every five years and our efforts puny, useless, and generally too late.
- We didn't use computers as well as we might.
- We were control freaks.
- And so on and so on.
I have always been seen as an executive who is ruthless! Ruthless with time that is, not people. So imagine my shock when my results, even though the best of the team, still showed I could get 63% back by being smarter.
Making good use of time
It was a true tipping point for the team. We determined to set up the company with a shadow executive team to run the day-to-day as though they were us. We defined our expectations and left them very much to get on with it apart from monthly formal reviews ahead of the Board meeting. Otherwise all executive controls were ceded to them.
That left us as coaches and mentors to the shadow team and strategists on our sale.
We not only grew the next level down dramatically in the course of the next few months but proved that our sell by date as an Executive Team had come. Once the sale had been achieved, the team knew it would get bigger jobs with the purchaser and that the shadow team would take over.
The 60-70% productivity improvement produced such great primary and secondary benefits that when we were hostilely attacked during the sale we had the time and resources to defend, while the shadow team ran the business as usual.
So the message here is to challenge people who say they are too busy. How do they know? Where is their time going? What are they doing that they could drop in favour of becoming better strategic leaders? For in that switch is the key to the next promotion and further personal, organizational, and stakeholder success.
How about you? How could you manage your time more effectively for the benefit of all and spend more time in your future?
Feel free to quote me."
Next: Future Practices Back: Why Bother? To: Shaping Tomorrow
Copyright: Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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