What Do Bosses Do All Day? The Shocking Truth Can at Last Be Revealed

Gotta hone those networking skills

Thanks to closed doors and fierce gatekeepers, bosses are tricky to observe in their natural habitat. Yet it might be useful to know what they do all day, and whether any of it benefits shareholders. A new Harvard Business School working paper sheds some light.

Researchers asked the chief executives of 94 Italian firms to have their assistants record their activities for a week. You may take this with a grain of salt. Is the boss’s assistant a neutral observer? If the boss spends his lunch hour boozing, or in a motel with his assistant, will she record this truthfully? Nonetheless, here are the results.

The average Italian boss works for 48 hours a week and spends 60% of that time in meetings. The most diligent put in another 20 hours. And the longer they work, the better the company does.

Less diligent chief executives are more likely to have one-to-one meetings with people from outside the company. The authors speculate that such people are trying to raise their own profile, perhaps to secure a better job. Bosses who work longer hours, by contrast, spend more of them meeting their own employees.

Bosses often complain that they get bogged down in day-to-day operations, says Rajesh Chandy, a professor at the London Business School. Regulations that make them legally responsible for their underlings’ wrongdoings are partly to blame. The prospect of jail is a powerful attention-grabber. Many bosses also feel they must dash around the world pitching to clients. Jim Hagemann Snabe, co-chief executive of SAP, a software firm, reckons that he met over 200 last year. Mr Chandy thinks bosses should spend less time with clients and more time thinking about the future.

How much time they spend thinking about anything is hard to measure. But in an experiment, Mr Chandy measured how often bosses use forward-looking words like “will” and “shall” in their public statements. He concluded that bosses spend only 3-4% of their day thinking about long-term strategy.

Brian Sullivan, the chief executive of CTPartners, a headhunting firm, says the most difficult part of his job is saying no to people who want a piece of his time. “If it was up to our partners I would be at every pitch,” he says. Mr Sullivan says the only time he gets for blue-sky thinking is when he is in the sky. “Chief executives will rue the day when BlackBerrys work on planes,” he predicts.

Bill Gates took regular “think weeks”, when he would sit alone in a cabin for 18 hours a day reading and contemplating. This, it is said, led to such strategic masterstrokes as “the internet tidal wave memo” in 1995, which shifted Microsoft’s focus (some say belatedly) to the web. But not every boss thinks he needs more time for thinking. “You can hire McKinsey to do that for you,” says one.

老板整天在干嘛?驚人真相終將披露

“撒網”技能有待磨練

多虧了緊閉的房門和盡忠職守的把關者，老板們得以狡猾地呆在自己的窩里觀察一切。然而，了解他們每天做什么，這些行為又對股東是否有利，也許是不無益處的。哈佛商業學院新披露的一份文件向我們揭示了部分真相。

調查對象為94位意大利公司的首席行政官，他們被要求讓助理們記錄下一周的活動。對這些，你也許不能全信。助理們是中立的觀察者嗎?如果老板在午餐時豪飲，或者和他的助理膩在汽車旅館，她會如實記錄嗎?盡管有此種種不定因素，調查結果如下：

一般，意大利老板每周工作48小時，而且60%的時間花在會議上。最兢兢業業的人，工作時長甚至達68小時。而且，公司的運營狀況和他們的工作時長成正比。

不那么勤勉的行政總裁，則更可能和公司以外的人進行一對一談話。作者推測，他們的動機是增加自己的籌碼，這樣或許得到一份更好的工作。相比而言，工作時間更長的老板則大部分時間都和自己的員工在一起。

倫敦商業學院的教授拉杰什·錢迪說道，老板經常抱怨他們糾結在日常業務中。導致此結果，部分可歸咎于規章制度，是它們的存在使他們要為屬下的違規行為負法律責任。坐監的景象可是個非常吸引注意力的玩意兒。許多老板同樣覺得自己必須到處奔波，以兜售產品。軟件公司SAP的聯合首席行政官吉姆·哈格曼·什納布估計他去年拜訪了超過200家客戶。錢迪先生認為老板的時間，不應多放在客戶身上，而應在思考公司的未來上。

老板花多少時間思考未來，很難衡量。但是在一個試驗中，錢迪先生測算了老板在公開演說時愿景類詞語，比如“將”“會”，出現的頻率。由此得出結論，老板每天只花3-4%的時間思考長期戰略。

獵頭公司CTPartners的首席行政官布萊恩·沙利文說，他工作最困難的一部分在于對只需他“少少”時間的人說“NO”;“如果是客戶的請求，我將隨時恭候”。沙利文先生說只有在飛機上，他才能放松下緊繃的思考神經。他預測“如果黑莓在飛機上也能運行，首席執行官將無限懊惱。”

比爾·蓋茨有自己固定的“思考周”。這樣的日子里，他可以獨自坐在小木屋，除了睡覺的6小時，其他都在讀書和冥想。據傳，此舉常能激發蓋茨在發展戰略上的神來之思，比如1995年將微軟的焦點(有人認為已經遲了)轉向互聯網，記入“因特浪潮備忘錄”。但不是每位老板都認為他需要更多思考，有人說：“你可以雇傭麥肯錫公司來為你做這些!”

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