Good morning.
Electronic communications have taken over most people’s lives, but for CEOs, face time still rules. A study of how CEOs spend their time, by Harvard’s Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria, found 61% of it is in face-face-meetings. “Face-to-face time is viewed as a signal of what or who is important,” Porter and Nohria write. While some CEOs have begun to use videoconferencing as an alternative, they “must never forget that at its core their job is a face-to-face one.”
The two professors collected data on 27 big-company CEOs (average annual revenue = $13.1 billion) over a three month period, asking their executive assistants to track time use in 15 minute increments. The study was published yesterday by Harvard Business Review. A few takeaways:
- CEOs in the study worked an average of 62.5 hours per week. Even on weekends, they put in an average of 3.9 hours daily; on vacations, they averaged 2.4 hours a day.
- The CEOs slept on average 6.9 hours a night.
- The vast majority of CEO work time (75%) was scheduled in advance. Only 24% was available for spontaneous interaction.
- CEOs spent 72% of their time in meetings, with one hour being the most common meeting length. (One CEO’s advice for time management: cut all meetings in half.)
- CEOs spent 70% of their time dealing with employees, and only 3% of their time with customers—less than the 5% they spent with consultants or the 5% they spent with board members. Bankers, who seem to be claiming the lion’s share of my time these days, got 2%.
Porter and Nohria asked each of the CEOs to describe the agenda he or she was pursuing, then tracked how much time they spent on activities that supported that agenda. The result: CEOs on average spent 43% of their time on activities that furthered their agenda. But that result varied greatly among the group, ranging from 14% to 80% of the leader’s work hours. Exercise time also varied greatly among the CEOs, suggesting the notion of CEO as “corporate athlete” has not yet fully taken hold.
More news below.
| Alan Murray | |
| @alansmurray | |
| alan.murray@fortune.com |
Top News
Apple Carveout
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Under Fire Over ICE
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Copy That
Last month, Xerox reached a truce with activist investors Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason to end plans to merge with Fujifilm, but it's still fighting its one-time partner over the soured deal. Fujifilm Holdings Corp. sued Xerox yesterday for breach of contract and estimated damages of more than $1 billion after the printer and copier company walked away from a planned tie-up earlier this year. Wall Street Journal
Ad-ing Women
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Around the Water Cooler
First Ladies in Formation
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Up for Debate
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Storm A-brewin'
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Back on Their Feet
WeWork, the co-working space company, started hiring refugees through a pilot project with the International Rescue Committee in 2017. Six months in, it had hired over 50 refugee employees. To date, it's brought onboard 150 refugees from more than 25 countries. Late last year it set an even more ambitious goal to hire 1,500 over the next five years. Fast Company
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by Claire Zillman. Find previous editions here, and sign up for other Fortune newsletters here.
