This article is excerpted from the book Great CEOs Are Lazy (Inc. Original Imprint, 2016)
A lot of the mediocre and hardworking CEOs we have run into over the years are exceptionally good at what we call “peanut buttering.” When it comes to allocating their time to the various tasks and stakeholders in their businesses—their boards, their supply chains, their investors, their communities, etc.—these CEOs do their best to spread their time as evenly as possible across all of them. The concern, of course, is to make sure everyone feels like they’re getting the CEO’s attention. In this effort, the CEO will work very hard, sometimes as much as eighty or more hours a week. The bad news is that this is the surest way possible to dilute the CEO’s impact on any one issue. Unfortunately, this concept of tending to every stakeholder is taught at many major business schools, which only perpetuates the error. This is done, in part, because CEOs aren’t certain what actions will drive the business forward; consequently, they work on all fronts, hoping one will yield results.
Lazy CEOs, on the other hand, play favorites with their time. Rather than allocating a uniform amount of time to everyone and everything, they give usually between 30 and 50 percent of their time specifically to the task of removing the constraint(s) in the business. Remember this: It’s only the work done at the point of the kink in the hose—the constraint—that will truly make a difference in your business. Whatever time is left gets distributed to the other stakeholders—some of whom may get zero CEO attention then, or perhaps forever. In an ideal world, smart CEOs would build a strong organization of individuals who would handle all of the work that is not at the point of constraint. That way, the only work our Lazy CEO would do would be to remove each constraint as it arose.