Companies routinely squander their most precious resource--the time of their top executives. Here are seven techniques that will help your management team make better and faster decisions
. The CIO asks for a few minutes to review plans for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. The manager of the largest North American business unit needs to present a major capital investment proposal for a factory automation program. The marketing senior vice president has to show some alternatives for a big print-advertising campaign. And the CEO himself wants to kick off an effort to revamp the company's annual planning and budgeting process.
The assistant creates a draft agenda, listing the items in the order they were submitted, allots a best guess of the time needed for each, and runs it by the CEO. He reorders the agenda a bit, putting the routine, operational items up front to ensure that the bulk of the meeting is focused on strategic issues.
But when the meeting takes place, his plan goes awry. The group has a long, drawn out debate about the look and feel of the advertising campaign, and the discussion of Sarbanes-Oxley turns into a gripe session about the IT department. The executives end up with little time to devote to the deeper business issues. They give the factory automation plan a green light after a cursory examination--to the CFO's great discomfort. They put off consideration of European competition for a future meeting. And they have an unfocused and ultimately inconclusive discussion about the CEO's new planning process. When the meeting breaks up--an hour late--people leave in a sour and cynical mood, complaining to themselves about another waste of valuable time.
The scenario I've just described is played out on a regular basis at almost any co ...