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Where's the Boss? Trapped in a Meeting
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The Wall Street Journal
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. The project, which is ongoing, so far has collected data from three different studies of CEOs from around the world.
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In one sample of 65 CEOs, executives spent roughly 18 hours of a 55-hour workweek in meetings, more than three hours on calls and five hours in business meals, on average. Some of the remaining time was spent traveling, in personal activity, such as exercise or lunches with spouses, or in short activities, such as quick calls, that weren't recorded by CEOs' assistants. Working alone averaged just six hours weekly.
The more direct reports a CEO had correlated with more, and longer, internal meetings, the researchers found. Rather than foisting off responsibilities to other managers, CEOs with more direct reports may be more hands-on and involved in internal operations, they said.
But not all direct reports are equal. In companies that incorporated a finance chief or operating chief into the corporate hierarchy, the CEOs' time in meetings was reduced by about five-and-a-half hours a week, on average, the researchers found.
Even if a CEO has a lot of direct reports, "the effect of the CFO or COO is stronger," and may help reduce a CEO's time spent in internal meetings, says Harvard Business School's Raffaella Sadun, a co-author of the project. The other researchers were Oriana Bandiera and Andrea Prat, of the London School of Economics and Julie Wulf of Harvard Business School. Their preliminary findings were just published in a Harvard Business School paper.
The researchers said they weren't surprised by the amount of time spent in meetings, since one of the roles of a CEO is to manage employees and meet with customers and consultants.
A busy meeting schedule—often conducted virtually in global companies—can indicate that executives are engaged with their companies and close to their managers and clients. Still, CEOs say they pine for more solo time to think and strategize.
Rory Cowan, CEO of Lionbridge Technologies Inc., a Waltham, Mass., technology-services firm with about 4,500 employees, says he is constantly communicating with staff and clients. "I don't know when I'm not in a meeting," he says.
Instead of spending a lot of time in long face-to-face meetings, however, Mr. Cowan spends more time "doing frequent iterative touches," either in person or via text messages, instant messaging and video chat—sometimes with "four or five windows open concurrently."
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