Your Scarcest Resource
Your Scarcest Resource
Most companies have elaborate procedures for managing capital. They require a compelling business case for any new capital investment. They set hurdle rates. They delegate authority carefully, prescribing spending limits for each level. An organization’s time, by contrast, goes largely unmanaged.|Bain & Company, with which all three authors are associated, used innovative people analytics tools to examine the time budgets of 17 large corporations. It discovered that companies are awash in e-communications; meeting time has skyrocketed; real collaboration is limited; dysfunctional meeting behavior is on the rise; formal controls are rare; and the consequences of all this are few. The authors outline eight practices for managing organizational time. Among them are: Make meeting agendas clear and selective; create a zero-based time budget; require business cases for all initiatives; and standardize the decision process.|Some forward-thinking companies bring as much discipline to their time budgets as to their capital budgets. As a result, they have liberated countless hours of previously unproductive time for executives and employees, fueling innovation and accelerating profitable growth
CITATION: Mankins, Michael. Your Scarcest Resource . : Harvard Business School Press , 2014. Harvard Business Review, Vol. 92, No. 5, May 2014, pp. 74 - 80 - Available at: https://library.au.int/your-scarcest-resource-3