tightening up your calendar

If you haven’t gotten serious about tightening up your calendar, now is the time to start. Do you really need all those meetings? Are there ways to minimize the length of essential meetings and still make progress? I am not against meetings – they are essential for leaders, not least because they help us bring facts to the surface and generate good decisions. At the same time, so many meetings are excessively long, unnecessary, and inconclusive. One of my favorite techniques is to require that teams provide me with a summary page at the beginning of the meeting or beforehand so that I could get the gist of the issue up front as well as the team’s recommendations rather than waiting for the story to unfold.

David M. Cote

Winning Now, Winning Later: How Companies Can Succeed in the Short Term While Investing for the Long Term. HarperCollins Leadership. 2020. p. 21

x days

You might find the prospect of modeling intellectual rigor for your team or organization daunting. How do you do it with so many demands on your time? For starters, I heartily recommend you dedicate time each month to learning about your business and engaging in unstructured thinking. It’s hard to think, read, and learn when endless meetings clog up your day. I developed a practice of sitting down with my calendar at the beginning of each fiscal year and asking my assistants… to designate two or three days each month as “X” days, during which they wouldn’t schedule any meetings. I’d spend some of those days alone thinking about our businesses. On other X days I’d make impromptu trips to learn about our businesses or pay a surprise visit to a facility. I’d also designate twelve additional days as “growth days,” holding intensive sessions with leadership teams to help them think through various growth or operations initiatives. My staff had to hold these growth days on their calendars as well so that we didn’t have to reconcile our calendars in the event we wanted to schedule a meeting (team members got these days back to use as they pleased if we wound up not holding a meeting that included them). Sometimes I had to schedule meetings on an X day, but anticipating that this would happen, I set aside more of these days at the beginning of the year than needed. 

David M. Cote

Winning Now, Winning Later: How Companies Can Succeed in the Short Term While Investing for the Long Term. HarperCollins Leadership. 2020. p. 20

balanced scorecard

Developing a compelling vision is a key activity of developing and setting strategy. A vision is a clear and powerful statement about what a company can and should be (Wilson, 1992). The balanced scorecard provided the framework to translate the vision from a statement or series of statements to metrics that operationalized the overarching vision and strategic objectives for the company (Kaplan & Norton, 2007). 

Jody Hilderman

Hilderman, J. (2022). Strategy Execution Using the Balanced Scorecard (thesis). Levene Graduate School of Business, University of Regina (Canada). 

the coward that dare not know

There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.

W.E.B. Du Bois

Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. Taylor & Francis. 2017 edition.  As found in 2022 Great Quotes From Great Leaders Boxed Calendar: 365 Inspirational Quotes From Leaders Who Shaped the World. 

by remaining what we are

In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.

Max De Pree

Leadership is an Art. Crown. 2011. p.100. As found in 2022 Great Quotes From Great Leaders Boxed Calendar: 365 Inspirational Quotes From Leaders Who Shaped the World.