PART ONE

TIME

Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.

—Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker’s dictum echoes through the halls of the corporate world every day. “There’s never enough time.” “Sorry, I don’t have the time.” If someone really could invent a twenty-five-hour day, he or she would make a fortune.

We use the term organizational drag to describe all the ways in which an organization eats up people’s time. It’s the meetings, the emails and phone calls, the bureaucratic processes and procedures. Some of these are essential. Others are pure time wasters. As our research shows, this kind of drag can be a killer. The average company loses 21 percent of its productive power, the equivalent of a day a week, to drag. Even the top-quartile companies lose 13 percent.

And is that really all? We asked our survey respondents, in effect, how many hours they spent in unnecessary meetings and communications, and they gave us their best estimate. Look at things a little more closely, however, and you realize that most people have come to view many of the meetings and communications they suffer through every day as a necessary part of their job. Only when their company begins managing its time more closely do they come to see that all those interactions weren’t really necessary at all. They then find themselves with a whole lot more extra time than the 21 percent or 13 percent figures might suggest.

So we take a two-part approach in this section of the book. Chapter 2 examines where the time goes and how companies can get much of it back through some simple time-management tools and techniques. Chapter 3 peels back the onion to reveal the needlessly complex structures that usually underlie all those meetings and interactions. Sometimes changing these structures is a big deal, but not always. Say, for instance, that your account representatives have to interact with a dozen internal people—product managers, technology specialists, regional marketers, and so on—every time they prepare a proposal for a client, just because of the way your company is structured. If you could reshape the organization to reduce those interactions by half, you would free up countless hours of unproductive time.

You may find the stories we tell a bit startling. We’ll introduce you to the meeting that ate up 300,000 hours of corporate time, most of it wasted. We’ll show how an executive assistant at one company was regularly spending millions of dollars of the company’s money every year, with no formal approval process. We’ll describe the company that realized it didn’t really need dozens of business units, hundreds of subsidiary companies, and no fewer than forty-nine corporate committees. We’ll also explain why companies seem to conduct those familiar spans-and-layers analyses year after year, without much effect on productivity. But for every cautionary tale, there’s a more inspiring one, of companies that have finally learned to manage their time effectively—and have the results to show for it.

Read on. Time’s a-wasting.