Each monthly issue presents groundbreaking research, analysis of the forces shaping the business agenda, and proven best practices designed to help individuals and organizations lead, manage, and compete more effectively and with greater purpose. If you'd like to share this PDF, you can purchase copyright permissions by increasing the quantity. Quantity price applied.
Add Copyright Permission. Copyright Permission Qty:. Current Stock:. Buying for your team? See quantity pricing. The workforce will become energized and committed, and performance will climb. The authors outline eight steps other companies can follow to break free of the conventional thinking about worker motivation, help a higher purpose permeate decisions throughout the company, and set off a positive chain of events.
Interestingly, businesspeople in emerging economies face similar challenges: The rules are unclear and infrastructure is lacking. The author presents examples of entrepreneurs who have done just that in China, Bangladesh, Africa, and Chile, benefiting the public as well as their own enterprises.
He then describes how an Indian health care organization is tackling institutional voids as it expands into medical tourism in the Cayman Islands. The argument is that when firms launching innovative products or services look beyond their self-interest and work to collectively build the institutional infrastructure, they—and society as a whole—are more likely to prosper. The U. Such efforts alone, however, cannot fix a wasteful and misdirected system. This article looks at two examples of bottom-up innovation, each involving a radical transformation of health care delivery.
The University of Mississippi Medical Center created a homegrown telehealth network to increase patient access to care; Iora Health developed a new business model that doubled down on primary care to reap large savings in secondary and tertiary care.
These successful initiatives—one from an incumbent health care provider and one from a business start-up—demonstrate the potential of creative leaders to reshape the U. As a result, 3-D printing is moving from a limited role such as prototyping and making conventional machine tools to a central place in manufacturing for a growing number of industries. This article presents them with a playbook and explores six possible business models that have emerged.
In fact, companies that automate their operations mainly to cut their workforces will see only short-term productivity gains, say the authors.
People need to train AI agents, explain their outputs, and make sure they are used responsibly. AI agents, in turn, can assist people with information gathering, data crunching, routine customer service, and physical labor, thereby freeing them for higher-level tasks that require leadership, creative thinking, judgment, and other human skills.
To get the most out of AI, companies need to redesign their business processes. After deciding what needs improvement—their operational flexibility, speed, or scalability; their decision making; or their ability to personalize products and services—they can devise appropriate solutions. That will mean not only implementing AI technology but also developing employees who can work effectively at the human-machine interface.
The authors describe how a number of firms are already taking these steps and optimizing collaborative intelligence. But many more should follow their example. As organizations become more global, matrixed, and complex, they are requiring employees to collaborate with more internal colleagues and external contacts than ever before. And although greater collaboration has benefits, it also leaves significantly less time for focused individual work, careful reflection, and sound decision making.
Organizational solutions are, of course, necessary to eradicate collaborative overload across the board. Leaders whose schedules are always booked up or whose EAs see themselves as gatekeepers and say no to too many people risk being viewed as imperious, self-important, or out of touch.
EAs play a key role in finding the right balance here. CEOs need to cordon off meaningful amounts of alone time and avoid dissipating it by dealing with immediate matters, especially their in-boxes. This proved to be a common problem among the CEOs in our study, who readily acknowledged it. Given that time in the office is easily eaten up, alone time outside the office is particularly beneficial. Long-distance travel out of contact with the office often provides critical thinking time, and many CEOs swear by it.
To capitalize on it, CEOs should avoid traveling with an entourage. External constituencies can be just as demanding as internal ones. Everyone wants to talk to the CEO, and dealing with external stakeholders is time-consuming.
It often involves longer workdays and time away from headquarters and from home. There is a risk of drifting toward outside commitments less tied to company success. It surprised some even more to learn that this was less than the amount they spent with consultants. The scant time devoted to customers is partly a function of the huge scope of internal responsibilities: As an executive ascends from managing a line of business which involves more-frequent customer contact to the job of leading the entire company, it is natural for customer-facing time to decline.
In B2C companies, there are also rich opportunities for customer contact. For retail CEOs, for example, store visits—especially unannounced ones—are an indispensable way to talk to regular customers, not just the company staff. Some CEOs systematically schedule time with customers. The CEO of a financial services firm in our study, for instance, aims to meet face-to-face with one customer a day.
A manufacturing CEO allocates two days a month to customer visits. Other CEOs try to build customer visits into their travel. A habit of some type seems to be the most reliable way to ensure enough customer time. Most of them found this surprising; they tended to believe they spent more. But while more time is likely to be better when it comes to customers, the same is not true with investors.
Too many meetings with investors can easily become a time sink and can draw the CEO into trying to manage the stock price rather than focusing on business fundamentals. Staying in touch with a few key buy-side investors, doing quarterly calls, and holding an annual investor day may be all a CEO needs to do—unless, of course, the company is dealing with serious investor unrest or activism. By and large, the CEOs in our study seem to have discovered such focus over time, after getting caught up early in their tenures in too much investor relations.
There is a real risk that CEOs will get distracted by outside activities not directly connected to the business, where they are in high demand and which often involve worthy community and social issues.
While CEOs should give back to their communities and play the role of business statespeople, they should carefully restrict the hours they personally spend on such activities and on participating in business groups.
All our CEOs understood the importance of spending time with their boards. But again we saw significant variation: One CEO spent six hours with directors; another spent However, that involves more than board meetings, committee meetings, and board retreats; CEOs must find time to build meaningful one-on-one relationships with individual directors. CEOs also need to keep the directors well informed and engage with them between meetings through newsletters and updates. A common understanding and alignment with the board is important in periods of stress or market challenge.
Each involves a duality—a seeming contradiction, akin to yin and yang—that CEOs must manage simultaneously in order to be effective. Chief executives exert influence along six dimensions, each of which involves a duality, or seeming contradiction akin to yin and yang.
Managing these dualities simultaneously is a hallmark of effective CEOs. First, CEOs clearly have direct influence over many issues and decisions, as their numerous reviews and one-on-one meetings reveal.
Good CEOs are very much in charge but work through others using strategy, culture, and effective organizational processes that drive sound analysis and alignment across the organization.
CEOs need to learn how to marry direct and indirect influence. However, CEOs are unique in the degree to which they must also engage and influence numerous external constituencies and represent the company to the world.
Effective CEOs connect their internal and external roles by bringing outside perspectives into the work of the company. Here, the CEO sets and drives the agenda. However, reacting well to unplanned and unforeseen events and crises is some of the most important work CEOs do. Fourth, while CEOs have a great deal of leverage to exert because of their position in the hierarchy and access to resources, they also face numerous—and often unrecognized— constraints and complexities in exercising that leverage.
They are constrained in how often they can overturn decisions that have been brought to them for approval or how quickly they can drive changes without securing the support and buy-in of their senior team and board of directors.
They must identify the group or people who are needed to bring about a change and then figure out how to win over the leader that will mobilize them. CEOs must find the right balance between taking full advantage of the leverage they possess, while being equally sensitive to the constraints they must navigate and the constituencies they must bring along. Otherwise, resistance will emerge and come back to bite them.
Everything a CEO does affects what the organization focuses on, its norms of behavior, and its culture and values. Sixth, CEOs hold a great deal of formal power and authority, and exercise it in the many ways we have described.
However, power, authority, competence, and even results are insufficient to truly ensure their success. Effective CEOs combine formal power and authority with legitimacy. CEOs achieve legitimacy when employees believe in them as people and as leaders.
They earn legitimacy in multiple ways—by demonstrating values, ethics, fairness, and a selfless commitment to the company and its people, among other things. Legitimacy gives rise to motivation that goes far beyond carrying out orders and can lead to extraordinary organizational performance. CEO time allocation, then, is not simply a matter of what happens in meetings and decision-making processes. It reflects the far broader set of ways in which the CEO as an individual engages with the organization and its people.
In managing across these six dimensions of influence, it is easy for CEOs to overlook the less direct, less top-down, less tangible, and more human aspects of their work. Without this awareness, though, CEOs give up some of their most powerful levers for driving change. Countless concepts, tools, and metrics have been developed to help leaders manage well. However, our study of what the CEOs of large, complex organizations actually do—as manifest in how they spend their time—opens a new window into what leadership is all about and into its many components and dimensions.
Being the CEO is a highly challenging role, and it is difficult to do it well. The success of CEOs has enormous consequences—good or bad—for employees, customers, communities, wealth creation, and the trajectory of economies and even societies. Being a CEO has gotten harder as the size and scope of the job continue to grow, organizational complexity rises, technology advances, competition increases, and CEO accountability intensifies.
The ideas we have introduced here aim to provide current and future leaders, who must bear this enormous responsibility, with a broader understanding of their role and how to best use their most important resource: their time. A look at the data on how CEOs allocated their time among various activities, places, priorities, constituencies, and meetings. You have 1 free article s left this month.
You are reading your last free article for this month. Subscribe for unlimited access. Create an account to read 2 more. Time management. Time is the scarcest resource leaders have. Where they allocate it matters—a lot. Porter and Nitin Nohria. The complete Spotlight package is available in a single reprint.
The Findings Leaders must learn to simultaneously manage seemingly contradictory dualities—integrating direct decision making with indirect levers like strategy and culture, balancing internal and external constituencies, proactively driving an agenda while responding to unfolding events, exercising leverage while being mindful of constraints, focusing on tangible decisions and the symbolic significance of every action, and combining formal power and legitimacy.
Running a large global company is an exceedingly complex job. It also involves a wide array of constituencies—shareholders, customers, employees, the board, the media, government, community organizations, and more. Unlike any other executive, the CEO has to engage with them all. On top of that, the CEO must be the internal and external face of the organization through good times and bad. CEOs should have a written agenda detailing their top priorities updated quarterly and should spend much of their time on activities that advance the agenda.
Include all the relevant players. Managers at all levels tend to complain about having too many meetings. One solution is to try keeping meetings small and inviting only those whose attendance is essential.
However, good CEOs delegate well, and to do so they need their direct reports and affected managers to be present. Otherwise, extra rounds of communication and follow-up will be needed after meetings. Good EAs avoid that problem by getting the right players in the room to begin with. Recognize the value of spontaneity. Most CEOs are overbooked. They would benefit from more time to walk the hallways and initiate unplanned interactions.
Zealously protect personal and family time. EAs should recognize that the long hours, travel, and stress of the CEO job can take a toll. Time with family and friends, regular exercise, and opportunities to recharge and reflect are crucial to effectiveness and avoiding burnout. A version of this article appeared in the July—August issue pp. Read more on Time management or related topics Leadership qualities and Leading teams. Next In.
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