With one of my life-coachees, in fact, sort of my only regular one (as I stopped the program a while back), we have achieved 52.5x growth (share price) in the last six years. We were reflecting back on it recently. Particularly around the changes we made in the company, its strategy, modus operandi and the rest. But above all, it was about the core operating principle, the fundamental question, that led us to deliver exceptional growth for our customers, employees, and shareholders. Not to mention taxes paid to the government which directly contribute to building infrastructure in the country. And that one question we repeatedly asked ourselves was: is it going to move the needle? Hence this leadership note.
You see, often when I speak about excellence, the person at the other end thinks that I am talking about building something excellent or that the final product must reek of excellence. All that is true, but it’s only half the truth. When I say excellence what I am equally stressing is the quality of the input. What we finally produce can never be world-class if we have built it with substandard ingredients. No matter how amazing the slicer or the fryer or the worker at the other end, can they produce McDonald’s fries with rotten or tiny potatoes? Whether it’s product, marketing, sales, strategy, ops, admin, or anything else at all, poor input equals poor outcome.
Naturally, the question arises how to ensure that the input is excellent? Excellent input means that the right person is doing the right work at the right time. And as a CxO or founder, the most expensive resource you have is not capital, not even talent. It’s your own attention. And I hope in the name of “attention to detail”, you are not devoting your attention to things better done by others.
In this leadership note, I am going to share one self-audit of where you should be directing your attention, one fundamental question you should ask yourself, the why behind drifting to low impact items and some data on where other leaders are spending their time. In fact, let me start with the last one first.
Where Others Are Spending Their Time
In a nutshell: not where they should be. Here’s the data to support my argument.
In 2018, Harvard Business School professors Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria published the largest-ever study of CEO time use. They gathered 60,000 hours of data from 27 large-company (equivalent of Fortune 500) CEOs over more than a decade. I think the findings are sobering even for the most disciplined operators. See the table below:
Even though most CEOs worked an average of 10 hours on weekdays (that’s 9am – 7pm, just being in the office) not including commuting time, and most remained engaged on the weekends, only 3% of their time was actually spent with consumers.
These were very busy CEOs. The question Porter and Nohria pushed them on, again and again in the debriefs, was whether all that activity actually mapped to the things only the CEO could do. Often, it didn’t.
Numerous times I’ve seen that we mistake motion for progress. Just moving along is not progress, in my humble opinion. Progress is are we doing it better than yesterday. Getting back to how leaders are spending their time, please see the chart below to know where their time actually went.
Other studies say the same thing: less than 10% of executives believe they spend their time on the things that matter most. That means nine out of ten leaders, by their own admission, know they’re working on the wrong things. By wrong, I simply mean things that are low impact items and that leads me to the next important point, the litmus test.
The Only You Test
It’s natural that people who directly work with or for me in various teams bring up issues all the time that need my input. Often (if not always) I push back because I find that it’s not my job to do their job. I know it sounds cruel but at the core of it, it’s simply a question of time management and doing my own job effectively. If you are doing other people’s jobs, when will you do yours? If you are making decisions on their behalf, when will you make your own? Not to mention decision fatigue which will invariably lead to making bad decisions.
To avoid all of the above and to turn your company into a lean-mean-fighting machine that’s laser focused on what it’s supposed to do, run every task through the Only You test first. In simple words, it’s asking yourself are you the best person to carry out this task? Is this the most optimum use of your time? Here’s a broad guide:
Before we move on, please know that this is not a debate about management style. Hands-on vs. hands-off, micro vs. macro, builder vs. delegator. Those describe how you work with your team but such labels say nothing about what you choose to work on. A wonderfully hands-off CEO who spends Monday on three low-impact tasks has wasted Monday just as completely as the most meddling micromanager.
Besides, I feel that management style is a tired and largely useless framing. A great CEO will (and should) go deep into the weeds when the issue truly matters. Steve Jobs obsessed over the curve of an icon where Bezos famously wrote two-pizza memos and read customer complaint emails personally. Were they micro-managers? In a sense, yes. But they went deep only on things that moved the needle.
The Weekly Self Audit
It’s called the A/B/C audit and it’s a useful exercise to help you put into practice all that I’ve mentioned thus far. I have only done this with a handful of CEOs till date and more than 60% failed the test. If you can do it religiously for the next four to six weeks, it will become your habit, post which, you can do it once a while for reinforcement purposes. Take last week’s calendar and go through it block by block. Against each block, ask one question: if I had not done this, would the company be measurably worse off in twelve months? Be honest. To make the audit easier, here’s the rough universe of items that almost always belong in the A bucket for a founder or CEO.
| Tag | What it means | What to do next week |
|---|---|---|
| A | Only I could have done this. It moved the needle. | Protect and expand. |
| B | I added value, but someone else could have run it. | Delegate it next time. |
| C | I should not have been there. | Kill it without ceremony. |
If you are spending more and more of your time on “A” items, you will be amazed at not only how the company will grow but how rapidly it will do so. While it may differ from one individual to another, and you alone are your own best judge, here’s broadly where a CEO or a founder’s input is usually a must.
Refuse what is delegable. You will be tempted to do others’ jobs just because they have asked and you can, but when we keep spending hours on the delegable stuff, we’re not just wasting our time, we’re doing injustice to our team. They will never get strong, because we keep doing their job.
I guess the uncomfortable question is this: when we know how important it is to work on high-impact items, why do even the best of the best veer off course and end up devoting time on things of negligible impact? Read on.
Why we drift toward the low-impact work
I feel that high-impact work is ambiguous, slow to validate, and often lonely. Reviewing a contract is a finite, completable task with a clean dopamine hit at the end. Deciding whether to shut down your second-largest product line is a multi-week, gut-twisting bet with no clean answer.
I have spoken about it in the past as well that how Jeff Bezos makes an excellent point. As a senior executive, he argues, you get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions, and he deliberately caps himself at roughly three a day, scheduling them before lunch when his thinking is sharpest. Bezos points out that Warren Buffett aims even lower: three good decisions a year.
Buffett, for his part, has been making the same point for decades. The trait that separates successful people from really successful people is saying no to almost everything. Note what’s implicit in that statement: every yes to a low-impact item is a no to a high-impact one. After all, time is zero-sum and there is nothing called a spare hour.
The hard part of decision making isn’t rejecting obvious junk. It’s saying no to perfectly reasonable, mildly tempting work in order to protect time for the few things that actually compound.
A starting point could be to identify three high-impact items, no more, that only you can do. Block fifteen hours a week for them, non-negotiable, on your calendar. Delegate ruthlessly anything that someone in your team can do at 70% of your quality, because their 70% done is infinitely better than your 100% never-started. Review weekly, not monthly, whether you actually spent those fifteen hours where you said you would.
At the end of the day, where you put your fifteen hours, that is what your company will become twelve months from now. It won’t be the strategy deck, OKRs or town halls but your fifteen hours that will make the difference. I have seen it happen more times than I can count.
Remember your job is not to be busy or keep your people busy. Your job is to move the needle. Everything else is noise, a distraction, a drain.
March on,
Swami