“Effective Executives know where their time goes. They work systematically at managing the little of their time that can be brought under their control. The supply of time is totally inelastic. There is no price for it, nor is there a marginal utility curve for it. Moreover, time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday’s time is gone forever and will never come back.”
– Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive
The demands on an executive’s time are never-ending. It is easy to get sucked into a limitless number of internal and external meetings and travel. To be a great executive, you must manage your time.
Where many execs get this wrong is that they don’t identify what they will stop doing. Instead, they manage their time across too many activities to make an impact.
I had the benefit of observing and learning from two of the best leaders of our generation: Jeff Bezos and Jeff Wilke. Here are some notable or unconventional decisions they made.
First, the two Jeffs rarely took meetings with external partners. As the world’s largest online retailer, every sales executive from every manufacturing company on the planet wanted to meet with both Jeffs. Early on, Jeff Bezos met with book publishers. Still, once we expanded into multiple retail categories in the early 2000s, he decided to delegate ownership of those relationships to VPs like me and my peers, who ran each retail category.
This decision not only gave me more authority, ownership, and autonomy, but it also meant that Jeff could focus his time elsewhere. A few years later, when Jeff Wilke’s role expanded to cover WW Retail and Operations at Amazon, he announced the same decision to his direct reports.
I cannot stress enough how unconventional this approach was. Most CEOs spend a significant amount of their time with external partners.
The second notable decision was made in 2004 when Jeff Bezos significantly reduced his weekly involvement in managing the consumer retail and marketplace business. I don’t have the exact figures for this, but based on Colin Bryar’s (my co-author) experience as his Technical Advisor or Chief of Staff, it was less than 10 hours per week. He was able to do this because he had a) developed leaders who could run the core businesses without his help and b) developed mechanisms like S-Team Goals and Input Metrics so that he could audit and monitor progress in just a few hours each week.
For perspective, in 2004, our consumer retail and marketplace business was close to 100% of our revenue – we had no AWS, FBA, Advertising, Alexa, Kindle, Prime Video businesses yet. Instead, he allocated the lion’s share of his time to ideation and innovation, which resulted in the creation of the aforementioned multi-billion dollar products.
Ask yourself this question: What should I stop doing to free up time to be more effective in delivering the right results?
