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meby Michael C. Mankins

Companies routinely squander theirmost precious resource-the time oftheir top executives. Here are seventechniques that will help yourmanagement team make betterand faster decisions.

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AFEW DAYS BEFORE AnyCo's biweekly top manage-ment team meeting, the CEO's assistant sends out

i an e-maii asking attendees to submit agendaitems. A hodgepodge of suggestions comes back. Thehead of HR wants to update the team on a nasty age dis-crimination lawsuit that's about to go to trial. The execu-tive vice president for the European business divisionwants to discuss disturbing competitive trends in her re-gion. The CIO asks for a few minutes to review plans forSarbanes-Oxley compliance. The manager of the largestNorth American business unit needs to present a majorcapital investment proposal for a factory automationprogram. The marketing senior vice president has to showsome alternatives for a big print-advertising campaign.And the CEO himself wants to kick off an effort to revampthe company's annual planning and budgeting process.

The assistant creates a draft agenda, listing the items inthe order they were submitted, aliots a best guess of thetime needed for each, and runs it by the CEO. He reordersthe agenda a bit, putting the routine, operational items upfront to ensure that the bulk of the meeting is focused onstrategic issues.

But when the meeting takes place, his plan goes awry.The group has a long, drawn out debate about the lookand feel of the advertising campaign, and the discussion

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of Sarbanes-Oxley turns into a gripe session about the ITdepartment. The executives end up with little time to de-vote to the deeper business issues. They give the factoryautomation plan a green light after a cursory examina-tion - to the CFO's great discomfort. They put off consid-eration of European competition for a future meeting.And they have an unfocused and ultimately inconclusivediscussion about the CEO's new planning process. Whenthe meeting breaks up-an hour late-people leave in asour and cynical mood, complaining to themselves aboutanother waste of valuable time.

The scenario I've just described is played out on a reg-ular basis at almost any company you might name, in-cluding, most probably, your own. Eor although time isthe scarcest resource in any com-pany-after all, no amount of moneycan buy a 25-hour day - the sad re-ality is that few top executive teamsmanage their time at all well. Aswe'll see in the following pages,the typical company's senior execu-tives spend less than three dayseach month working together as ateam-and in that time they devoteless than three hours to strategicissues. Moreover, in my experience,those three hours are seldom well spent: Strategy discus-sions tend to be diffuse and unstructured, only rarely de-signed to reach good decisions quickly.

The price of misused executive time is high. Apart fromthe frustrations that individual managers suffer, delayedor distorted strategic decisions lead to overlooked wasteand high costs, hastily conceived and harmful cost reduc-tions, missed new product and business developmentopportunities, and poor long-term investments.

But as I will also show, drawing on the experiences ofmy firm's clients, a few deceptively simple changes in theway top management teams set agendas and structuremeetings can make an enormous difference in their effi-ciency and effectiveness. And once the members of theleadership team get the basics right, they can make morefundamental changes in the way they work together.Strategy making can be transformed from a series of frag-mented and unproductive events into a streamlined, ef-fective, and ongoing management dialogue. For compa-nies that have done this, management meetings aren't anecessary evil; they're a source of real competitive ad-vantage, enabling top executives to make better decisionsand to make them faster.

One global firm spentmore time each year

selecting the company'sholiday card thandebating its vitalAfrica strategy.

Michael C. Mankins (mmankins@marakon.com) is a man-aging partner in the San Francisco qffice ofMarakon Asso-ciates, an international management consulting firm. He isa coauthor of The Value Imperative: Managing for Supe-rior Shareholder Returns (Free Press, 1994).

How Valuable TimeIs SquanderedA very real constraint on the financial performance ofmost companies is top management's capacity to reachgood decisions quickly. Both quality and pace are impor-tant. Obviously, poor decisions made too quickly will leadto actions that destroy shareholder value. But good-evengreat - decisions made too slowly can depress companyperformance as well. Unfortunately, research shows, fewcompanies manage executive time in a disciplined or sys-tematic way.

In the fall of 2003, my firm, Marakon Associates, collab-orated with the Economist Intelligence Unit to conduct

a survey of top management teammembers (the CEO, COO, CEO,business unit presidents, managingdirectors, and so on) from 187 com-panies worldwide with marketcapitalizations of at least $i billion.We wanted to understand how theseteams invest their collective time.Specifically, we wanted to know howmuch time top managers spend to-gether as a team and, when theymeet, how they set priorities, how

they manage the time, and how successful they think theyare at reaching important decisions.

Even though the companies surveyed compete in dif-ferent geographic markets and in disparate industries -ranging from telecommunications equipment to whole-sale banking to consumer foods-top managers wereremarkably consistent in their views of how effectivetheir executive team meetings are. Our findings supportwhat many executives have long suspected-namely, thatthey spend too much time discussing issues that havelittle or no direct impact on company value. Even worse,their meetings often fail to produce both the quality andquantity of decisions required to drive superior perfor-mance. Specifically, here's what we discovered.

Top management teams spend relatively little timetogether. Executives at the companies we surveyed spentan average of 21 hours a month together in leadershipteam meetings. Moreover, the time they spent in any onemeeting was relatively short, seldom more than fourhours at a stretch - and less in bigger companies whosemanagement teams were widely dispersed geographi-cally. Given the importance of the top team's decisionsto company value, it's clearly imperative that such limitedtime is used wisely. Sadly, that was hardly the case.

Agenda setting is unfocused and undisciplined. At halfthe companies surveyed, top management's agenda waseither exactly the same from meeting to meeting or adhoc. In fact, when asked how they set meeting priorities,most executives said they were driven by the crisis of the

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moment ("We have a production problem in Unit A; there-fore, this month we will focus top management on UnitA"); historical precedent ("Every November, we reviewour human resource policies"); or egalitarianism ("Every-one in the room will get his or her chance to speak").

In many companies, the problem is compounded bythe fact that no one is explicitly responsible for manag-ing the leadership team's agenda. So the process for get-ting important matters in front of top management canbe inefficient, even sloppy. One firm in our sample, forexample, set top management's agenda through what itdescribed as a "first in, first on" process - where (as in ourhypothetical example) the CEO's secretary set the agendaby adding topics as they were phoned in by executive teammembers. Not surprisingly, too many items frequentlyended up on the agenda and, consequently, the teamoften ran out of time before it could address key items.

Less than 5% of survey respondents said their companyhad a rigorous and disciplined process for focusing topmanagement's time on the most important issues. The re-sults are all too predictable. The urgent crowds out theimportant, and meetings end late, frustrating team mem-bers, or-worse yet-end on time without reaching impor-tant decisions. In effect, top management delegates manyof the company's most important issues to lower levels inthe organization-to individuals ill equipped to deal withthe problems' underlying complexity and poorly placedto see the larger ramifications of their decisions. Such de-cisions often conflict, as a strategy chosen by one unit worksagainst the strategy chosen by another, slowing executionand undermining performance.

Too little attention is paid to strategy. It's probablynot surprising, given the ad hoc way meeting prioritiesare set at most companies, that top management spendsless than three hours a month discussing strategy issues(including mergers and acquisitions) or making strategicdecisions. In fact, our research reveals, as much as 80% oftop management's time is devoted to issues that accountfor less than 20% of a company's long-term value. At oneglobal financial service firm in our survey, for example,a senior line executive reported that top executives spentmore time each year selecting the company's holiday cardthan debating the bank's strategy for the entire continentof Africa (where they had made significant capital invest-ments). They are hardly exceptional: The exhibit "Wherethe Time Goes" gives a detailed breakdown of how a typ-ical top management team spends its time.

Top management meetings aren't structured to pro-duce real decisions. Most leadership team meetings(more than 65%, according to our research) are not evencalled for the purpose of making a decision. They're heldfor "information sharing," "group input," or "group dis-cussion."The meetings that do focus on strategy are mostcommonly off-site brainstorming sessions - typicallyamorphous events that produce few tangible outputs. As

Where the Time GoesHere's how, on average, top management

teams spend their time together in any given

year; only 15% is devoted to strategic issues.

Total top management time.250 HOURSPER YEAR

minus:

operating performancei 62 HOURS

27 HOURS

administrative issuesand policy 22 HOURS

wnrkfnrfp issups 22 HOURS

rnrporatp gnvprnanrp 18HOURS

fnandalpnliry 14 HOURS

invpstnr cnmmunirations and guidance 12 HOURS

team bLJildioq n HOURS

succession planning

litigation

10 HOURS

6HOURS

community service andsDcialiespflosihility 6 HOURS.other 3 HOURS

Total nonstrategytime

time left over for:

strategy developmentand approval

213 HOURS

37 HOURSPER YEAR

3 HOURSPER

MONTH

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a consequence, very few executives surveyed (only 12%)believed that their top management meetings consis-tently produced decisions on important strategic or orga-nizational issues.

When leadership team meetings do produce decisions,many organizations have difficulty making them stick.Once the meeting ends and the team disbands, partici-pants often take away very different interpretations ofthe group's decision. Some members may be unhappythat the team didn't go far enough in its decision, andthey work to stretch the group's mandate as far as possi-ble in communications down the line. Others may viewthe team's decision as incomplete or tentative and com-municate only high-level guidance to subordinates, ef-fectively delaying execution until management providesclearer direction. Still others may think the team's deci-sion is inappropriate or just plain wrong. They can issuewhat amounts to a silent veto by relaying nothing to thetroops, hindering (or even preventing) execution.

Seven Techniques for ExploitingValuable TimeSerious as they are, the problems I have described can befixed. At a number of companies - ABN AMRO, Alcan,Barclays, Boeing, Cadbury Schweppes, Cardinal Health,Gillette, Lloyds TSB, and Roche-executives have foundways to improve teamwork at the top. Leaders spend theirtime together addressing the issues that have the greatestimpact on the company's long-term value. The top manage-ment team employs rigorous processes to produce high-quality decisions at pace. As a result, these firms have gen-erated better financial performance and higher rates ofvalue growth than their competitors.

While every executive team we studied is different andfaces different challenges, we have been able to identifyseven common techniques they all use in some form tomanage their agendas and achieve superior value growth.To make the most of the limited time that top manage-ment spends together each year, executives at the mostsuccessful companies:

Deal with operations separately from strategy. Re-viewing operating performance and making strategy de-cisions are distinct activities, requiring different modes ofdiscussion and different mind-sets. Our research suggeststhat the most successful companies hold separate meet-ings for each purpose. This prevents day-to-day operationsfrom dominating the leadership team's agenda and freesup time for substantive strategy debates. Dutch bankinggiant ABN AMRO has recently taken this approach as partof its new management framework.

In the early i99os, the bank's managing board-com-prising the chairman and the top five executives - spentmost of its time reviewing loans and discussing day-to-dayoperations. That wasn't a problem in those days, when

ABN AMRO had what Rijkman Groenink, the currentmanaging board chairman, describes as "the luxury ofcapital and talent." Back then, he recalls, "the bank facedno real capital constraints and few important resourcetrade-offs." Thus the board spent very little time, if any, de-bating strategy or making resource allocation decisions.But when Groenink became chairman in May 2000, ABNAMRO faced significant resource constraints. Global fi-nancial markets had consolidated, and stiff competitionemerged from the likes of Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase,and ING. Confronted with this new reality, Groenink be-lieved ABN AMRO needed "a new and more-disciplinedapproach to resource allocation."

An important element of Groenink's approach was totransform the managing board into a decision-makingbody that truly had clear authority and could be fairlyheld accountable for the bank's performance. This trans-formation required fundamental changes in both thetiming and the structure of board meetings. Whereas his-torically the board met twice a week for three hours todiscuss the bank's operations, under the new frameworkit meets only once a week to discuss operations and thenonce a month-for a full day-to debate strategy and makeimportant resource allocation decisions. The new meet-ing calendar reduces the time board members spendtogether each month (from 24 to 22 hours). But it signif-icantly increases the time dedicated to strategy-from aslittle as one hour a month to as much as ten.

Since then, ABN AMRO has dramatically improved theeffectiveness of its board meetings. The clear delineationbetween operations time and strategy time allows theboard to focus each session and perform both roles better.To improve operating reviews, the bank has installed ad-vanced information and performance-reporting systemsthat allow the team to monitor results and debate oper-ating issues on an exceptions basis. That has left the boardfree to adopt many of the other improvements to its strat-egy sessions that I will describe below.

Focus on decisions, not on discussions. The changesneeded to focus a leadership team's meetings more in-tensely on decision making can seem almost surprisinglyinnocuous. At British confectionary and beverage giantCadbury Schweppes, for example, the chief executive com-mittee approves the company's strategy and investments.The CEC meets for two full days six times a year to debateimportant strategic and organizational issues. T\vo smallchanges have had a big impact on the quality and pace ofthis group's decision-making capabilities.

First, since 1997, all reading materials have been dis-tributed to participants at least five days before each CECsession. Whenever possible, standard templates are usedto display important financial, market, and competitorinformation. This gives each CEC member time to care-fully review materials before the meeting and quickly getup to speed on important issues. Second, a standard cover

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sheet is included with all materials specifying preciselywhy people are being asked to read them-for informa-tion purposes only, for discussion and debate (in whichcase, the key issues are highlighted), or for making a deci-sion and deciding a course of action.

Since the purpose of each agenda item is clearly indi-cated and all materials are reviewed in advance, CECmembers can devote meeting time to making decisionson important issues rather than to having those issuesexplained in lengthy PowerPoint presentations. What'smore, the structure imposed by the standard cover sheethas encouraged Cadbury Schweppes executives to dealwith many matters outside the meetings-to find otherways to review materials marked "for information pur-poses" only and to gather input from CEC members be-fore meetings on items marked "for discussion and de-bate." This reserves even more meeting time for itemslabeled "action and decision."

Some companies find that shiftingthe focus of their top managementmeetings from discussion to decisionmaking has a wholly transformativeeffect. That was true at the Britishbank Barclays, where Matt Barrettspurred a cultural revolution soonafter becoming group chief execu-tive im999.The bank's executive com-mittee (EXCO), a group of managersrepresenting business and functionalsilos, had held weekly meetings thatamounted to what Barrett calls "bi-lateral discussions with the CEO withan audience." But Barrett made itclear that he wanted the EXCO to bean integral part of governance andcontrol - to be, in his words,"the linch-pin between management and theboard of directors." To do that, it hadto focus its time on decision making.

One of the first steps Barrett tookwas to establish a common ambitionfor the team-to create "a real passionfor performance at Barclays," spurringthe EXCO to set the objective of dou-bling the market value of the bank infive years. Next, EXCO members sawto it that this objective was transmit-ted toeach line of business-tothe in-vestment bank, the retail bank, thecredit card division, and so on. In thisway, it was made clear that each mem-ber of the EXCO had a role to play indriving value growth at the bank. Ei-nally, detailed information was devel-oped for each line of business specify-

How toGetthe Time BackSeven techniques can help

you get control of your top

management agenda and

make sure meeting time is

spent building value.

1. Deal with operationsseparately from strategy,

2. Focus on decisions,not on discussions.

3. Measure the real valueof every item on the agenda.

4. Get issues off the agendaas quickly as possible.

5. Put real choices on the table.

6. Adopt common decision-making processes andstandards.

7. Make decisions stick.

ing where and how it was creating and destroying value(often at the product and customer level). The establish-ment of common goals, combined with the generation ofsuch detailed strategic and financial information, allowedBarrett to focus the EXCO on tangible debates about whatneeded to be done to double the value of the bank. Theresult has been a marked change in the nature of EXCOmeetings. Where once the bank was "drowning in tacticalissues," Barrett maintains, "80% of the EXCO's time is nowfocused on strategic decision making."

Measure the real value of every item on the agenda.If top managers were presented with five issues, and theyknew that resolving one would create 20 times morevalue than dealing with the other four combined, theywould naturally spend their time addressing the issue ofhighest value. Of course, the importance of agenda itemsis rarely labeled so explicitly. As a result, top executivesrisk wasting valuable time on trivial issues and postpon-

ing important decisions, sometimesindefinitely.

Successful companies prioritizethe problems and opportunities ontop management's agenda accord-ing to the "value at stake"-that is,according to the impact that resolv-ing each issue will have on the com-pany's long-term intrinsic value (thenet present value of the company'sfuture cash fiows discounted at theappropriate risk-adjusted cost ofcapital). This can be done througha broad sensitivity analysis usingthe company's valuation model;numeric precision is not the object ofthis analysis, only a general under-standing. Typically, lower levels ofthe organization should address thelow value-at-stake issues. Conversely,high value-at-stake issues should al-ways be on top management's agendairrespective of organizational bound-aries. Identifying items according totheir strategic value makes top man-agement's agenda the critical tool indriving company performance andtranslating strategy into action.

Roche, the Swiss drug and diagnos-tic product maker, is one companythat uses this approach particularlyeffectively. CEO Eranz Humer hascreated a"decision agenda" compris-ing the ten most important oppor-tunities and problems the companyfaces. A disciplined process is usedto create and update the agenda in

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which the value at stake is quantified for each issue. All to-gether, work on those ten items takes up more than halfofthe chief executive committee's time each year. By fo-cusing top managers' time on Roche's highest value issuesin this way, Humer has transformed the quality and paceof strategic decision making at the company.

Get issues off the agenda as quickly as possible. Com-panies that focus top management on growing long-termvalue have just as rigorous a process for getting issues offthe agenda as they do for getting the right issues on it inthe first place. In other words, once the right issues are onmanagement's agenda, it's imperative that the team havea clear way to resolve them. Such a process must includean unambiguous timetable, detailing when and how teammembers will reach a decision on each issue and whomust be involved in approving the final strategy.

At Cardinal Health, founder and CEO Bob Walter main-tains that "a leader needs to keep people's noses to thegrindstone and raise their eyes to the horizon."This view,combined with Walter's natural impatience, has given riseto a leadership model that treats"delay as the worst form of denial."So, all senior managers at thepharmaceutical and medical sup-ply distributor work under a strictdecision-making timetable drivenfrom the top. Walter explains: "Ifyou get to the end of a meetingand people ask, 'Did we make adecision on that? Oh, I guess wedecided to delay,'then you are in denial....! have a men-tal clock running at all times that pushes me to moveahead. I try to get everybody else moving ahead as well."

Walter pressures Cardinal's managers to continuallyask themselves, "When does this decision need to bemade?" and then make sure their timetable will enablethem to reach a decision in time. All communications arestreamlined - or, as Walter puts it, "crisp"-to focus theteam on the most important aspects of a decision. Fur-thermore, Walter himself keeps a careful check on thedecision timetable so that issues get off management'sagenda as quickly as possible. This practice facilitatesrapid decision making and prevents overanalysis.

Put real choices on the table. Once the right issues areon the table and the clock is running, the most importantrequirement for effective strategic decision making is topresent viable options. After all, management can't makechoices if it doesn't have real alternatives. In our view,management needs to have at least three alternativesbefore any strategy should be discussed or approved. Thesemust be real alternatives - not just minor variations on asingle theme. But our research suggests that this practiceis the exception rather than the rule at most companies.Only 14% ofthe executives we surveyed were consistentlypresented with any alternative strategies.

Often, the biggest challengea top management team

faces is agreeing on what itagreed to in the meeting.

Perhaps no executive has used alternatives more effec-tively to drive breakout performance than Brian Pitman,former chairman and CEO of the British retail bankLloyds TSB {and currently on Marakon's board of externaladvisers). Under his leadership, the bank's market valueincreased an incredible 40-fold from 1983 to 2001. Pitmanwould tell his executive team: "There is always a betterstrategy; we just haven't thought of it yet." Accord i ngly, hewould insist on seeing at least three alternatives fromevery Lloyds TSB business before approving that busi-ness's strategy. "To be confident of what you are accept-ing," he would say, "you have got to understand what youare rejecting." By forcing a constructive debate about alter-natives. Pitman drove a number of fundamental changesin the bank's strategy, impelling the company to exit in-ternational markets, establish a low-cost position, andinitiate a drive to deliver truly superior customer service.Under his leadership, the search for alternatives was relent-less. "The second you believe you have a 'winning strategy,'you are going to be copied," he insists. "You have got to be

constantly focused on reinvent-ing your business....It all startsand ends with alternatives."

In considering strategy alter-natives, many top managementteams find it helpful to separatetheir discussion of alternativesfrom their ultimate selection ofthe best strategy. This practiceputs all options on the table be-

fore starting the evaluation process. How many timeshave executives sat through a presentation of a strategicplan or investment proposal knowing that there wasanother viable course but not knowing whether it hadbeen considered and rejected? That's why companies likeABN AMRO, Cadbury Schweppes, and Boeing often holda meeting to discuss alternatives before they meet to ap-prove a course of action. Here, "approve" means there areno other appropriate alternatives that the top team hasn'treviewed. And it means that none ofthe alternatives theteam has reviewed is illegal or in conflict with some otherstrategic initiative at the company.

Separating the generation of strategic alternatives fromtheir evaluation and approval improves the ultimate se-lection process. When top managers are confident that allalternatives have been thoroughly evaluated, they aremuch more willing to choose a course of action and allo-cate the necessary resources-in effect, to make a final de-cision. There's less chance of rework-the all-too-commonscramble at lower levels to generate additional analysisto "satisfy the boss"- and the ultimate choice is moremeaningful.

Adopt common decision-making processes and stan-dards. Some top management teams find it difficult toaccelerate the pace of decision making without sacrificing

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quality, but there are ways to avoid that trade-off. Even ifthey can't make each decision any faster, they can reachmore decisions in the same amount of time by consider-ing more issues in tandem. To do so, companies with su-perior decision-making capabilities use a common lan-guage, methodology, and set of standards for makingdecisions. This lets them address many issues at once -often outside the team meetings. Individual decisionsmay not be made any faster in this way, but the team willbe able to reach many more decisions each year.

Barclays is a case in point. Barrett believes that much ofthe improvement in the bank's performance under hisleadership has come from increases in both the qualityand the quantity of executive committee decisions, whichwere made possihle hy a common language and decision-making methodology.

"We have a couple of important standards," Barrett ex-plains. "No self-delusion, and create and sustain compet-itive advantage or don't do it." All strategic decisions aresubject to three tests that are well understood throughoutthe organization: They must be fact based, alternativesdriven, and consequential. By "fact based," Barclays meansthat opportunities must be identified through a clear un-derstanding of how each Barclays business creates (orcould create) shareholder value. Strategic and financialinformation (the "facts") must be provided to show thatthere is sufficient value at stake to justify EXCO consider-ation. By "alternatives driven," Barclays means simply thatbefore any recommendation is made, at least three alter-natives must be presented to the EXCO for scrutiny anddebate. "Consequential" means that after a decision isreached, it has to be embedded in a business's operatingplan, and its subsequent performance must be carefullymonitored. Establishing these common standards haseffectively expanded the executive committee's capacityto make decisions without sacrificing their quality.

Make decisions stick. Often, the biggest challenge atop management team faces is agreeing on what it agreedto in the meeting. Indeed, unless strategic decisions aretranslated into something tangible, they can become sub-ject to reinterpretation or, even worse, fall victim to thesilent veto.

Like Barclays, several successful companies we studiedmake the strategic decision-making process consequen-tial by tying resource allocation to strategy approval. AtABN AMRO,Alcan, and Cadbury Schweppes, for example,the outcome of strategic planning is a fonnal performancecontract, which specifies the resources (time, talent, andmoney) required to execute the strategy, as well as the fi-nancial results that management pledges to deliver.

This process makes strategic decisions stick in twoways. First, it forces companies to be clear about what thefinal decision is. If there is ambiguity about the resourcesrequired to execute the strategy or about what resultsshould be expected over time, the leadership team can

withhold its approval until those things are nailed down.In effect, tying decisions to resources means the leader-ship team must formally approve each business unit'sstrategy. Second, performance contracts make strategydelivery easier to track. A business unit's performance canbe monitored relative to tbe terms of its contract. If thebusiness fails to deliver Its contracted level of perfor-mance, then the strategy goes back on top management'sagenda for reevaluation and eventual course correction.The business units and top management are left with lit-tle room for doubt or reinterpretation.

In addition to process solutions like performance con-tracts, some companies establish norms of behavior forleadership team members to foster greater collaborationand to make decisions stick. When jim Kilts became CEOof Gillette in 2001, for example, he established just suchclear ground rules. One was: "Decisions at Gillette arefinal. The team is free to debate any decision in staff meet-ings, but once a decision is reached, there is no more de-bate-no 'I don't agree with this, hut I'll do it anyway' hall-way conversations."

To put teeth into the team's norms. Kilts has membersrate each other's performance every year - a rating thathas a significant impact on their compensation."Top man-agement compensation used to be based on effort ratherthan results," Kilts says. "The higher the promise, the bet-ter the reward, and the last one in with bad news got offeasiest." Now, at the end of each year, the Gillette execu-tive team grades the quality of its decision making andits overall performance (on a one-to-five scale) in this way:

• All team members grade themselves.• The CEO grades each team member.• Each team member grades the team overall.• Each team member grades each of the other teammembers.

In this way. Kilts and the other members of Gillette's ex-ecutive team keep the focus on decision making and en-courage individual members to keep their commitments.

If more companies recognized that top management'stime was their most precious resource, we would seemany more of them adopting the practices I have just de-scribed. Strategic planning would not be about off-sites orplanning books. It would be a matter of ensuring that thetop management team focuses on the most important is-sues, considers ali viable alternatives, and makes the bestpossible choice in the shortest period of time. Meetingagendas would be systematically managed and continu-ally refreshed so that the right issues came on - andoff-the agenda as quickly as possible. In short, strategicplanning would be designed to exploit valuable time anddrive more and better decisions faster. ^

Reprint R0409C; HBR OnPoint 7715To order, see page 139.

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