Most companies have elaborate procedures for managing capital. They
require a compelling business case for any new capital investment. They
set hurdle rates. They delegate authority carefully, prescribing
spending limits for each level. An organization's time, by contrast,
goes largely unmanaged. Bain & Company, with which all three authors
are associated, used innovative people analytics tools to examine the
time budgets of 17 large corporations. It discovered that companies are
awash in e-communications; meeting time has skyrocketed; real
collaboration is limited; dysfunctional meeting behavior is on the rise;
formal controls are rare; and the consequences of all this are few. The
authors outline eight practices for managing organizational time. Among
them are: Make meeting agendas clear and selective; create a zero-based
time budget; require business cases for all initiatives; and
standardize the decision process. Some forward-thinking companies bring
as much discipline to their time budgets as to their capital budgets. As
a result, they have liberated countless hours of previously
unproductive time for executives and employees, fueling innovation and
accelerating profitable growth.