Is Your Prospect As Busy As CEOs Studied By Harvard?

This London’s Times business section snippet alerted me to an HBR survey of CEO routines. Here’s the columnist’s idea of the lead ‘revelation’. Meetings reign;

37 of assorted lengths in any given week

72pc of their total work time spent in them

When you discover the original work was done in part by Strategy doyen, Michael Porter, you soon realise other, more explosive findings exist within.

Still, there’s something of keen selling note here.

You could for instance, use these as a disarming line to gatekeepers.

Are they like those billion-dollar CEOs who Harvard found spend four solid days a week in meetings?

What I’d have loved to have seen in the data is how much of their time they set aside for actively discussing fresh, new, different ideas.

As you can see from a section of their infographic at the foot, they have ‘alone time’ and can be ‘spontaneous’. Another finding suggests that around 36% is spent “in a reactive mode”. So how much of the remaining roughly two-thirds is genuinely ‘proactive’? Surely they also know they must keep on top of tomorrow. And to do that, they must see me, right.

Which perhaps introduces the construct;

How much of their week do they set aside for looking at new ideas (and how do they allocate it)?

Although the standard rule applies. People commit firmer to fixing a problem. They’ll spend time with us if we might be able to make better an issue of priority. So we can go for a slot among that 36pc reactivity chunk too…