In the Media: Latest News - 2013

Financial Times
How do highly paid chief executives fill their working hours?

Academic and author, Tom Lloyd, begins a short series of articles that seek to unravel the mysteries of "reaching the top". One reason people object so strongly to executive pay packets is that they are mystified by them: they question what it is about chief executives' work that makes it worth so much. It is not an easy question to answer; certainly not as easy as the answer implied by chief executive pay packets - that the CEO, and the CEO alone creates value for shareholders. But although the numinous quality of leadership defies analysis, it is possible to get some idea of how CEOs spend their time.

Two studies by researchers at Harvard Business School analysed CEO activity by looking at their diaries. Both found, not surprisingly, that CEOs spend most of their working time in meetings. The aim of the more recent study was to map the CEOs' "span of activity" on to their "span of control". It found that at companies with chief operating officers and chief financial officers, CEOs spend more time on their own, presumably thinking CEO thoughts.

Full article available from the FT website.

The Wall Street Journal
Where's the Boss? Trapped in a Meeting

What do chief executives do all day? It really is what it seems: They spend about a third of their work time in meetings. That is one of the central findings of a team of scholars from London School of Economics and Harvard Business School, who have burrowed into the day-to-day schedules of more than 500 CEOs from around the world with hopes of determining exactly how they organize their time—and how that affects the performance and management of their firms. Their study—known as the Executive Time Use Project—incorporates time logs kept by CEOs' personal assistants, who tracked activities lasting more than 15 minutes during a single week selected by the researchers.

External article link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204642604577215013504567548.html

Our paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/12-053.pdf

4Ps Business and Marketing
Should CEOs Waste time on 'Internal Meetings'?

"Too many Meetings, too much time wasted," is a lament one often hears within top and middle management. Should CEOs even believe in meetings?

After analysing the timetable of 94 European CEOs of major corporations, Prof. Raffaella Sadun of HBS' Strategy unit, in an April 2011 paper titled, What CEOs Do, and How They Can Do it Better, concludes, "The vast majority of a CEO's time, some 85 per cent was spent working with other people through meetings... while only 15 per cent was spent working alone. Of the time spent with others, CEOs spent on average 42 per cent percent with only "insiders"; 25 per cent with insiders and outsiders together; and 16 per cent with only outsiders. Likewise, time spent with insiders was strongly correlated with productivity increases. For every 1 per cent gain in time spent with at least one insider, productivity - for example, profits per employee - advanced 1.23 per cent. Less reassuring, however, was that the time CEOs spent with outsiders had no measurable correlation with firm performance."

For full article go to http://www.4psbusinessandmarketing.com/28072011/editorsdesk.asp?sid=4738&pageno=3

Related Work:

What Do CEOs Do? Oriana Bandiera, Luigi Guiso, Andrea Prat, and Raffaella Sadun , March 2011

The Wall Street Journal
The Juggle, Worth It to Work Long Hours?

In this age, when the 40-hour work week is increasingly viewed as part-time, many of us are pulling long hours at the office. But at some point, all that time spent in the cube reaches a point of diminishing returns and it's worthwhile just to call it a day and head home.

Determining that point, however, is tough, as Laura Vanderkam writes in a recent piece for Fortune.com. Vanderkam, the author of the helpful time-management book "168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think," examines the academic research on hours worked and actual productivity to try to come up with an answer.

Researchers at Harvard Business School, the London School of Economics and other institutions have launched a CEO Time Use Project to determine how a chief executive's time corresponds with a company's performance, defined as revenue per employee and the profitability of the firm. (The project uses time logs kept by CEOs' personal assistants, among other data.)

The study, which so far only has data from a group of Italian CEOs, found a strong correlation between the hours worked and the productivity of the firm; every one percentage point rise in hours worked meant firm productivity rose by 2.14 percentage points, Vanderkam writes.

For full article go to http://blogs.wsj.com/juggle/2011/07/13/worth-it-to-work-long-hours/

Related Work:

What Do CEOs Do? Oriana Bandiera, Luigi Guiso, Andrea Prat, and Raffaella Sadun , March 2011