Anyone who answers yes to this question is lying. Not because being 100 per cent productive 100 per cent of the time is impossible, but because if you were 100 per cent productive 100 per cent of the time, you wouldn’t be reading this: you’d be being productive.
Or is that right? Does being productive preclude reading a book? In theory, reading could help you become more productive. It could help to refocus your efforts so that you might switch from ‘doing things right’ to ‘doing the right things’, to paraphrase Peter Drucker. True, while you’re reading you are inputting rather than outputting, but all output not only makes Jack a dull boy, it also means Jack never refills his tank. In fact, reading, along with meditation and yoga, is listed among the activities involved in ‘sharpening the saw’, the seventh of the famous 7 Habits of Highly Effective People detailed by Stephen R. Covey.
Effective, you may object, is not the same as productive. You can be productive without being effective; for example, you can produce lots of furniture, but fail to adapt it to the taste of your customers, leading to surplus inventory and associated overheads – which are the opposite of productive. The subtler question is whether without being productive you can be effective at all. An effective politician, say, has to produce policies and arguments. Without these he or she would have no material to work with. So being effective is being usefully productive.
What about the other part of the question – the 100 per cent of the time part? This is a book for business leaders, not robots, even if some of those leaders will use robots in their factories. Indeed, the very idea of the factory is that of a 24/7 operation, even if it can’t be staffed by humans at such intensive levels, or if the factory itself will sometimes need to close for maintenance. As for those leaders, let’s break the 100 per cent down. Take off 25 per cent for sleep, and another 25 per cent for weekends, holidays, family, friends, illness and random interruptions. That leaves 50 per cent of the time, or twelve of the twenty-four hours. That’s not a short working day, of course, but it’s about right for most modern leaders. How to optimise the twelve hours to be most productive and, of course, effective? Should they even work fewer hours, on the hypothesis that it’s better to work less but more effectively?
Christopher Rodrigues, the former president and chief executive of Visa International, once gave a speech in which he literally added up the number of hours and days he had available to him in a year. He drew a triangle on a flip-chart and put this number at the triangle’s apex. At the base he wrote another number, to represent all the hours and days available to the combined front-line staff of his organisation. Needless to say, it was many thousand times greater than the number at the top. Clearly, the total productivity of the junior staff massively outstripped his own. That was the reality. There was no way he could ever compete.
A resignation speech this was not. His point was about effectiveness, about the relationship between his available time and theirs. It was in this relationship that he could switch from being merely productive to becoming massively effective. How so? He defined his job as the boss as enabling, empowering and supporting the junior guys as much as he could. If he did that, he could act as a lever and shift the whole organisation. His status was best used not by being as productive as possible on his own stuff, because that would always have a pretty low limit, but by using his relationship with his staff as a multiplier.
It’s an idea that goes against some of our accepted ideas about effective leadership. We tend to think that the effective leader is someone who personally does a lot, someone who makes things happen directly, someone who controls the pyramid from the top. But Rodrigues ended his speech by turning the flip-chart upside down. The effective leader, he was suggesting, is a phenomenon you could only infer from an effective organisation. If your organisation was effective, it meant the boss was doing his or her best to help others do their job. The boss uses his or her limited resources most effectively by freeing up the resources of others.
What does that look like in practical terms? There are certain things that only the boss can do, and as a general rule the boss should stick to doing what only the boss can do. Doing anything else eats into the margin of effectiveness. And the three main things that only the boss can do are 1) make the biggest decisions; 2) resolve the blockages; 3) act as the most credible representative of the organisation to an outside audience. Of these three, it’s the middle one that has the greatest bearing on the organisation’s effectiveness. Things get gummed up in organisations mainly for reasons of politics, which is another name for business reality. Even apparently operational blockages, like the lorries arriving late at the depot, or the hotel running out of bottled water, often have ‘political’ causes at their root to do with things like one department not trusting another. This is precisely why strategies are so feeble in the face of reality. Most of the politics is more overt, of course, often revolving around a clash of egos. In all cases, the politics diverts energy from the work, and when that happens, the effectiveness drops too. What the boss can do is use his or her authority to refocus people on the job. Then the work can flow again.
In short, being 100 per cent productive 100 per cent of the time may be as undesirable as it is impossible. The point is to be effective, and to use one’s position in the organisation to lever as much power from that organisation as possible.