Time and strategic management

Tonight we all lost one hour. Well nothing serious about that, we will get it back next autumn. :-)

I have been studying strategic management lately and well.... it all sounds quite simple and straightforward in the theory-books. In practice however, as every manager knows, the everyday problems and life are serious fighters against any strategic initiatives. And one of the most important issues is time or actually the lack of it. The managers just don't have time. Even when they start working in the evenings and weekends they still cannot get all the everyday issues resolved and never get to the strategic, but not so burning issues. So I thought of a metric that maybe is of some help.

Count how many meetings in your calendar are:
- initiated by you,
- initiated by you due to an "everyday problem"
- initiated by others.

This would be a relatively objective measure on who or what is running things. Is it you, is it the everyday problems, is it somebody else... or is it the everyday problems of somebody else. :-) You can of course modify the list. For example add sales and customer meetings in it and categorize them. Nevertheless you get an objective measure on who or what specifies the direction your team is moving towards.