News Archive 2012

Business Insider
What The Most Successful CEOs Know About Time Management

The most successful CEOs have killer time management skills.

A real understanding of how to prioritize and delegate is what separates CEOs of global companies from the rest, according to new research by Columbia University's Andrea Prat.

Full article is available on the Business Insider website

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