This also raises an interesting board question. We spend enormous amounts of time reviewing strategy decks, KPIs and financial reporting, but almost none looking at how the CEO actually allocates attention. Yet the calendar may tell you more about the operating model than many formal reports do.
I’d extend this beyond CEOs. If the company protects the founder’s thinking time while engineers, scientists and product leaders spend their days jumping between calls, the underlying problem has not really been solved. Deep work probably needs to become an organisational design principle rather than an executive perk.
There is almost a paradox here: the more competent the CEO, the easier it is for the organisation to become dependent on them. Because escalation works, people keep escalating. What looks like strong leadership in the short term can quietly become a scalability problem.
I wonder whether the real metric should be less “how many meetings can we remove?” and more “how many meetings end with a decision that could not reasonably have been made asynchronously?” That would probably eliminate a surprising amount of calendar activity.
The frontier-tech angle makes this particularly relevant. When a decision requires someone to simultaneously understand science, regulatory constraints, manufacturing, financing and customer requirements, the cost of interruption is not the five-minute interruption itself. It is reconstructing the entire mental model afterwards.
This also raises an interesting board question. We spend enormous amounts of time reviewing strategy decks, KPIs and financial reporting, but almost none looking at how the CEO actually allocates attention. Yet the calendar may tell you more about the operating model than many formal reports do.
I’d extend this beyond CEOs. If the company protects the founder’s thinking time while engineers, scientists and product leaders spend their days jumping between calls, the underlying problem has not really been solved. Deep work probably needs to become an organisational design principle rather than an executive perk.
There is almost a paradox here: the more competent the CEO, the easier it is for the organisation to become dependent on them. Because escalation works, people keep escalating. What looks like strong leadership in the short term can quietly become a scalability problem.
I wonder whether the real metric should be less “how many meetings can we remove?” and more “how many meetings end with a decision that could not reasonably have been made asynchronously?” That would probably eliminate a surprising amount of calendar activity.
The frontier-tech angle makes this particularly relevant. When a decision requires someone to simultaneously understand science, regulatory constraints, manufacturing, financing and customer requirements, the cost of interruption is not the five-minute interruption itself. It is reconstructing the entire mental model afterwards.