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other examples of unconventional time management come from
the staid world of management consulting. Consultants are
notorious for long hours and frenetic activity. Three characters
broke all the conventions. They were also all spectacularly
successful. The first, called Fred, made tens of millions
of dollars from being a consultant. He never bothered to
go to business school, but managed to set up a very large
and successful firm of consultants where almost everyone
else worked 70 or more hours a week. Fred visited the office
occasionally and chaired partners’ meetings once a month,
which partners from all over the globe were compelled to
attend, but preferred to spend his time playing tennis and
thinking. He ruled the firm with an iron fist but never
raised his voice. Fred controlled everything through an
alliance with his five main subordinates. The second, alias
Randy, was one of these lieutenants. Apart from its founder,
he was virtually the only exception to the workaholic culture
of the firm. He had himself posted to a far-distant country,
where he ran a thriving and rapidly growing office, also
staffed by people working unbelievably hard, largely from
his home. Nobody knew how Randy spent his time or how few
hours he worked, but he was incredibly laid back. Randy
would only attend the most important client meetings, delegating
everything else to junior partners and if necessary inventing
the most bizarre reasons why he could not be there. Although
head of the office, Randy paid zero attention to any administrative
matters. His whole energy was spent working out how to increase
revenues with the most important clients and then putting
mechanisms in place to do this with the least personal effort.
Randy never had more than three priorities and often only
one; everything else went by the board. Randy was impossibly
frustrating to work for, but wonderfully effective. The
third and final eccentric time user was a friend and partner:
let’s call him Jim. He shared a small office, together with
a handful of other colleagues. It was cramped and full of
wild activity: people talking on the phone, rushing round
to get presentations done, shouting from one end of the
office to the other. But there was Jim, an oasis of calm
inactivity, staring thoughtfully at his calendar, working
out what to do. Occasionally, he would take a few colleagues
aside to the one quiet room and explain what he wanted everyone
to do: not once, not twice, but three times, in life-threateningly
tedious detail. Jim would then make everyone repeat back
to him what they were going to do. Jim was slow, languid
and half-deaf. But he was a terrific leader. He spent all
his time working out which tasks were high value and who
should do them; and then ensuring that they got done. |
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