50% Of Your Working Time Should Be Unscheduled??? Really???

World-renowned business author and leadership expert Tom Peters has been advising large corporations and multi-faceted businesses on management and leadership for more than 40 years now.

Considered one of the world’s leading gurus in business management and the most influential business theorist of our time, Peters defines leadership as:

‘The art of getting others to want to do, that which you are convinced should be done.’

Similarly, Peters believes the mark of an effective leader is the impact she or he has on the attitude and performance of others, and on the legacy they leave when they move on.

Peters’ much-acclaimed theory of leadership includes the ‘Seven S Framework’:

Strategy, Structure, and Systems, (the hard S's) and

Staff, Style, Shared Values, and Skills, (the soft S's).

These tips provide a company with the means to analyse itself, and over the past 30 years, Peters has added, modified and continually grown his original theory.

In a recent interview with global consulting and management firm McKinsey and Company, Peters contends that despite the turbulent pace of today’s business world, the way we approach our fellow human beings has not changed that much over the past few thousand years.

He says the real thrust of leadership continues to be about organizing the affairs of our fellow human beings, in order to provide some sort of a service to other people.

At some deep level, Peters says, people are still people, and he believes passionately there is little fundamental difference between leading in the 21st Century AD or leading in the 21st Century BC, for example.

To explain this, Peters quotes business visionary Peter Drucker, who maintains that in simple terms, the number-one trait of an effective leader is that they do just one thing at a time.

Today’s technology tools may give you great opportunities to do 73 things at a time, or at least delude yourself you are, says Peters.

But the downside is you often see managers who look like 12-year-olds with attention deficit disorder, running around from one thing to the next, constantly barraged with information, and constantly chasing the next shiny thing.

Peters maintains the only thing on earth that never lies to you - is your calendar.

That’s why he is fanatical about time management, despite the growing consensus in today’s business world that teaching time management is not important.

However, in Peters’ mind, there could be nothing more important.

Peters quotes from ‘Leadership the Hard Way’, by Dov Frohman, to illustrate this point.

He says the two things he learnt most from the book are, one, that 50 per cent of your time should be unscheduled.

And second, (and Peters finds this humorous coming from Frohman who is a former member of Israeli intelligence); that the secret to success is daydreaming.

Peters believes leaders need to make the most of their unscheduled time by being students in a way that perhaps they had never been before.

He quotes American physicist Albert Allen Bartlett, who said:

‘The greatest shortcoming of the human race is its inability to understand the exponential function.’

Peters believes Bartlett was talking about the sustainability of population growth - but he might just as well have been talking about how big companies never outperform the market over the long haul.

The real question is how to survive, says Peters, and one of the best ways to deal with today’s insane pace of change is to live smarter, and learn new things.