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You’ve developed a great product or service. You’ve designed the right strategy to turn your idea into a profitable business. Yet for your company to achieve its full potential, you also need your managers and staff to carry out their roles efficiently and effectively. In this article, I highlight the most common business productivity pitfalls and show you how to avoid them. I share techniques and best practices that will keep your business running efficiently every day.
Before I get into it, here are some quick links to the sections I cover below:
Do you have great ideas for growing your business but are swamped by e-mails and meetings and struggle to find time for the big projects that could really make a difference? Do you wish your management meetings were better at generating action and making your managers accountable? Do your staff make too many routine mistakes or spend their days working on things that don’t really matter?
If you’re looking for fresh productivity ideas, you are not alone. Controlling and directing a small business is really challenging. But good techniques exist, that you could be using today, to get your managers and staff working on the right things in the right way. If that sounds like something that could help your business, read on.
In this article we will show you how to:
Eliminate inefficient work habits and processes that waste the time of your management team.
Identify the projects that can really make your business successful and move them forward efficiently.
Implement an effective set of routines for monitoring and directing your executive team.
Implement systems to ensure that your rank-and-file staff execute routine processes efficiently.
Empower your staff to do their value-creating work better by spreading best practice.
Put into practice simple people management skills that will draw out the best performance from your managers and staff alike.
Taken together, these productivity techniques can really help you run a successful small business.
Let’s get started by looking at the things that waste time for your top managers and how to eliminate them.
Eliminate inefficient work habits and processes that waste the time of your management team
Top executives usually work long hours. It’s true that hard work goes with the territory of a senior role. But many managers are swamped by their responsibilities. And there comes a point where hours away from family and simple tiredness undermine an executive’s effectiveness.
Why are so many managers over-worked? Wasn’t technology supposed to make us more productive? We are surrounded by tools that – in theory – enable us to get work done more quickly and effectively. But it’s not working. What’s gone wrong?
The problem is that a modern business executive’s job is never complete because their tasks are open-ended. Let’s illustrate the point by comparing managers with rank-and-file staff.
Most blue and white collar employees have finite responsibilities. Once they have produced their daily target of 100 widgets or invoiced customers for all completed projects, their work is done.
By contrast, a modern executive’s task may be to ‘grow the business’, ‘improve business productivity’, ‘develop innovative new services’ or just ‘stay ahead of the competition’. Those tasks are never complete – literally, never.
Under those circumstances, managers must decide what work they will not do and then carry out the work that they do choose to tackle efficiently and effectively. Working longer hours can never be a substitute for prioritisation and efficiency if your role is open-ended – there is always more to do.
Happily, many companies have lots of scope to become more productive. That’s because too many of the hours that managers work at the moment are spent on projects or tasks that are low in priority or carried out inefficiently. The first step towards running a business successfully is to eliminate this waste of valuable executive time.
This is scarcely a new subject. The great management writer Peter Drucker began his seminal book The Effective Executive [1] with an exhortation to managers to identify all their wasted time and then cut it out. His book was first published in 1967, yet more than 50 years later most of us are still struggling to live up to his challenge. His book remains a great read.
So where do we waste the most time?
Two of the biggest modern small business productivity killers are e-mail and meetings. With the right approach, you can turn these from a time-wasting burden into tools for getting work done quickly and effectively.
The solution lies in persuading the whole management team to adopt agreed rules of the road for using them. This can be tricky — it usually requires executives to change long-standing habits and patterns of behaviour, which some may resist. Yet if the whole team commits to streamline the way that senior management communicates, the rewards can be significant:
E-mail. Use e-mail to communicate information, requests or instructions — not as a channel for having a discussion. Put a stop to those long, disorganised e-mail chains by picking up the phone or setting up a meeting instead – it’s much more efficient. Agree company-wide protocols for when to use ‘reply all’, ‘cc’ etc. Use technology tools and sub-folders to prioritise and process your incoming e-mails. Log off from e-mail altogether when you need to set aside an hour or two for in-depth work. And so on.
Meetings. With a few simple steps, you can banish long, aimless meetings. Only schedule a meeting if it has an actionable outcome – most obviously, a decision. Adopt clear protocols for who is required at meetings and who can be informed of conclusions via e-mail. Set clear expectations for what each invitee will be expected to contribute.
Ensure every meeting has a specific agenda and a chair who is tasked with keeping things moving. And so on.
A good business advisor can work with you to transform your use of e-mail and meetings by developing ideas that are tailored to your company’s particular workflow and needs. If you’d like to read up on this first, there are plenty of good books on this subject. I particularly like The Crazy Busy Cure [2] by Zena Everett – a contemporary take on how to stop wasting time in the modern office.
While e-mail and meetings are today’s biggest small business productivity killers, management teams usually have many other opportunities to save time and work more efficiently.
First, let’s consider what I will call creeping obsolescence. Over time, as circumstances and company priorities change, some business processes cease to serve the purpose for which they were put in place. Yet if nothing is done, they continue out of habit.
How many internal reports do companies produce that nobody reads anymore? How many meetings are held about topics that are no longer important? How many customers continue to get intensive service even though their purchasing volume no longer merits it? How much time is wasted as a result?
Management should periodically review meetings, reports and other processes and ask: if we didn’t do this already, would we start doing it now?
Second, let’s consider the potential for technology to improve the outcome from business processes or reduce their cost. Some companies don’t yet use of all the small business productivity tools that are available to them. If you don’t use them already, here are five examples that might work for your company:
Slack or Microsoft Teams are communication and collaboration apps. They allow users to create separate chat spaces (or channels) which can be dedicated to particular teams or projects. Teams also has a videoconferencing facility. This can help save on endless back-and-forth emails.
Asana, Basecamp and monday.com are project management apps that are designed to facilitate processes and help teams hit their project deadlines.
Square Appointments and Acuity are scheduling apps. They simplify the process of booking appointments with clients and colleagues without the need for multiple emails.
Expensify and Spendesk are designed to speed up expense reporting, approval and reimbursement procedures (including integration with company accounting software).
Grammarly, Crystal and Hemingway Editor are apps designed to save time on drafting emails or other written material — either through correcting grammar, striking the right tone or improving readability.
I have already noted how technology often fails to deliver on its promise to improve small business productivity. Yet the fault lies in the way we are using technology and not with the technologies themselves. Provided you can solve the behavioural issues that hinder the use of tech tools in many workplaces, technology could increase the productivity of your business significantly. [3]
Third – personal organisation skills. There are many good formulas out there for how we can all become better at organising ourselves. A good example is set out in Getting Things Done [4] by personal productivity guru David Allen. I particularly like his recommendations for organising your To Do list around ‘next actions’ (i.e., the next step on a project, and one that you could action right now) and his ‘weekly review‘ methodology.
Which, if any, formula you decide to use to organise your workflow is an individual choice – it’s just down to what works for you. But however you choose to manage your business and personal life, remember that your e-mail Inbox is not your To Do list!
Fourth and finally, let’s consider delegation. It’s an essential skill to master if you and your organisation are going to reach their full productivity potential.
Why? Because the amount of time you have is fixed, but by delegating tasks to someone else you buy more of it. And the more time business leaders have available, the more of it they can spend on the transformative projects that only they can plan and execute.
There are many good frameworks for effective delegation. In his book Extreme Productivity [5], renowned productivity author Robert Pozen proposes the following:
Set out the overall, high level goals and constraints for your project clearly at the start.
Establish accurate and specific metrics that capture the project’s goals.
Make the necessary resources available to your team, whether financial, personnel or other.
Monitor without suffocating. Don’t micro-manage – a hard habit to break out of.
Tolerate mistakes. Staff will make mistakes — this is part of the learning process.
How much discretion should a boss delegate? That depends on unique factors like the nature of the project and the expertise of the person to whom the task is being delegated.
Leading productivity author Michael Hyatt has set out a useful framework for levels of delegation, from close supervision without decision-making autonomy to full delegation, in his book Free to Focus [6]. By using this or another suitable framework, you can delegate the right level of authority to your staff.
Identify the projects that can really make your business successful and move them forward efficiently
By communicating more efficiently, eliminating needless meetings and processes, leveraging small business productivity tools and delegating effectively, top executives should be able to free up a significant amount of their time. What should they use it for?
To begin with, they should restore a proper work-life balance if it has been lost amid the pressure of work!
Beyond that, they should re-allocate freed-up time to more productive uses within the business. In doing so, they should be careful not to fall into the trap of Parkinson’s Law – that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
In other words, having saved time by eliminating waste, they should ensure that their daily calendar doesn’t fill up with small-bore work that won’t ever move the needle of company performance.
Taking on small tasks is a huge temptation. Our daily or weekly To Do list is usually dauntingly long. The small tasks are often the easy ones that don’t require much mental energy. And by tackling small tasks, we can steadily tick items off our To Do list. That makes us feel good – we actually get a pleasurable dopamine hit in our brains from the sensation of making forward progress.
The problem is that the small tasks are not the ones that make a difference.
Instead, executives should redirect their efforts onto the tough, challenging projects that drive an organisation to long-term success rather than just keep it ticking over. Identifying an organisation’s critical priorities and then galvanising its employees to take on the challenge of reaching ambitious goals is one of the key skills of successful business leaders and managers.
Launching new products and services or penetrating new customer segments is difficult, time consuming work. But just imagine the impact it would have if every top manager could block out two hours of their calendar every day to work on projects that could really transform an organisation’s fortunes.
This brings us to the topic of time blocking. It is an essential counterpart to any plan to refocus your time onto big projects.
We have all had the experience of trying to make headway on a large piece of work and being interrupted every 15 minutes. This breaks your concentration, forcing you to re-read and gather your thoughts again. By the time you have done that, another interruption comes along and the cycle begins again. It’s incredibly inefficient.
Instead of that, try scheduling several blocks of time in your weekly calendar for uninterrupted, in-depth work. Let’s say two hours at a time. To get maximum benefit, schedule them at the times of day when you know you have the mental energy to tackle hard jobs – perhaps between 10am and midday. It’s surprising how much work you can get through once you get focused on a topic.
There is a tension here of course. The modern workplace relies on productive collaboration, which requires team leaders to be accessible to each other and to their subordinates. To make time blocking successful, you need to be pragmatic.
So if you want to try time blocking, don’t shut yourself away for hours on end with an order never to be interrupted. If you do, you will end up with a demoralised team who need reviews or approvals from you and consequently fall behind in their own work.
Instead, design your schedule in a way that maximises the productivity of your team and your firm overall. Coordinate it with your team’s weekly workflow and with the usual pattern of interaction between senior executives. Introduce sensible protocols for interrupting you to deal with urgent issues. If you make it easy for your colleagues to work around your schedule, they will be more likely to respect it.
Finally, let’s turn to the high priority projects that managers should focus their time on. Which projects are they? How should we select which tasks to focus on?
Some small business CEOs find that having a regular dialogue with a good small business advisor or small business coach helps them to identify the key priorities to focus on. For others, it helps to have a system to hand that steers you to prioritise your projects in a logical way.
If you are in the latter camp, try reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People [7] by Stephen R Covey. I’m not a big fan of the book overall, but Covey’s recommendations for how to prioritise the work that will add the greatest long-term value to your business are very insightful. (For the record, The 7 Habits has sold more than 40 million copies to date, so clearly a lot of people do like it!).
Covey argues that we spend our time in four ways, which can be represented in a quadrant. One axis of the quadrant reflects importance and is divided between Important and Not Unimportant. The other axis reflects urgency and is divided between Urgent and Not Urgent. Covey argues that all the issues we face can be evaluated by assigning them to one of the four areas of the quadrant.
I have included below a quadrant diagram that follows Covey’s original structure, but which I have adapted to include my own recommendations for how best to address the tasks that fall under each category.
Every manager’s first reaction is to work on tasks that fall into the Important/ Urgent area, for obvious reasons. But many of us also spend a lot of time on tasks that are Urgent/ Not Important. That’s because we respond to urgency – we mistake urgency for importance.
Most of the really value-building work we can do resides in the Important/ Not Urgent area. These are the projects that don’t have a near-term deadline – or even a deadline at all – but could transform the fortunes of your business on a 3-5 year view. Yet we find too little time to address the tasks that lie here – they are always bumped down our To Do list by things that are more ‘urgent’.
By learning how to say ‘no’ to things that are not important and by effective use of delegation, we can drastically cut the time we spend on non-critical issues. This should free up time to work on the Important/ Not Urgent projects that can really make a difference to our organisation.
As we do so, the demands on our time from issues that are Important / Urgent should also decline. As Covey observes, many of these issues have developed into crises because we have spent too little time in the past on strengthening our business with the work that is Important but Not (yet) Urgent.
Implement an effective set of routines for monitoring and directing your executive team
Now that you have streamlined your management processes and redirected your time towards major projects, you need to make sure that your management team keeps the company moving steadily forward towards your objectives. What’s the best way to do this?
Keeping a company moving forward usually requires the top management team to adopt an effective set of routines. These routines are the week-to-week process by which a CEO directs his or her management team.
Your routines should keep your managers abreast of all the issues that are important for the company, foster informed discussion on key decisions and enable the CEO to monitor the performance of executives and hold them accountable for delivering agreed objectives.
For most management teams, the backbone of their routine will be scheduled weekly, monthly and quarterly meetings backed up by reporting packs of financial and non-financial data and an agenda for discussion and action. If you want to increase the profits from your business, it’s essential that these meetings work effectively.
Here are a few common pitfalls to avoid when designing your management routines:
Too much meeting time spent on sharing information. Everyone should receive the relevant materials (e.g., monthly data pack) in advance and read them before a meetings starts.
Too little prioritisation of key issues. Time in meetings should be focused on the small number of high priority issues that can really make a difference to performance.
Too little high quality data. Informed discussion and accountability require financial and non-financial data that are sufficient in scope, relevant, accurate and clearly presented.
Too much talk, not enough action. Every meeting should have a purpose, which should usually be to take decisions about future actions. Debate is essential, but for the purpose of deciding on what actions to take.
A small business advisor or small business coach can share best practices and work alongside you to design routines that can keep your company moving forward. If you prefer to do some research of your own, books abound on how to get your management team working effectively.
None of them represents the last word, but one I like is Traction [8] by Gino Wickman. I particularly like his concept of running a company on a 90-day cycle. This aims to keep the energy of the management team directed at targets that are sufficiently near that there is no room to relax or drift off course. I also like his proposed structure for weekly management meetings, combining disciplined use of time, rigorous prioritisation and accountability for short-term To Do items.
The appropriate tempo, content and format for management meetings and other routines at your company will depend on its unique circumstances – its size, its industry, its growth rate, its objectives and so on. But putting the right processes in place should improve the productivity of any business.
Implement systems to ensure that your staff execute routine processes efficiently
How should you make sure that your rank and file staff are spending their time on the right things and executing their work in the most efficient way?
For my recommendation on how to keep your staff focused on the right things, see this separate article on implementing KPIs. A well-designed set of KPIs represents a strategic management system. The system incentivises your staff to focus their effort on the operational targets that are most critical if your company is to deliver great results for your clients.
Once you have put a good strategic management system in place, you need to combine it with a set of tools and practices that help your staff to work on their roles in the most efficient way.
Your first key opportunity is to ensure that they carry out routine tasks as efficiently as possible. Do all your staff execute their routine tasks in the most efficient way, or are your processes a hodge podge?
The best way to maximise efficiency is to create systems for your routine tasks that are most critical for the effective functioning of your company. A task is critical if it occupies a lot of staff time or if it is a key bottleneck to generating profits and cash flow.
The first step is to identify your critical processes. For example, closing a project and raising an invoice to a client for completed work in a timely manner might well be a critical process. Re-ordering office stationery would likely not be.
Next, you need to identify the most efficient way to execute the task. Then document this method in an easily accessible and user-friendly format – ideally using a simple software application.
Finally, you need a mechanism that records staff compliance with the approved process each time they execute a relevant task. The easiest way to do this is by using a standard project management software package.
Putting in place systems for your critical processes involves an upfront cost in terms of staff time. But in the long term, the systems you have created will free up management time, because they enable new staff to train themselves and they eliminate mistakes.
Systems also improve business efficiency because processes are carried out the right way, every time. Finally, they remove single person dependency because every member of staff can be allocated a backup who can easily step up in cases of sickness, holiday or staff departure.
The inefficiencies that arise from a lack of systems are often hidden. They show up as re-work, training costs, duplication, delay etc. If you want to increase the profits from your business, eliminating these inefficiencies can be a vital step.
For anyone looking to implement systems to help run their business, a good small business advisor or small business coach could work with you to identify the approach best suited to your company. Alternatively, the best book I have read on the subject is SYSTEMology [9], by David Jenyns. The book is a step-by-step guide to designing and setting up the systems that can get your business processes running efficiently and effectively without your constant input.
The original book on creating systems to run your business is The E-Myth Revisited [10] by renowned business author Michael Gerber. Later authors have built on the concept that Gerber first popularised. Although the writing style is now a little folksy and dated, it is nevertheless also a great read.
Do all these systems amount to micro-managing? Don’t systems turn your staff into robots and remove their autonomy and creativity?
No they don’t. It’s important to distinguish between routine tasks and value creating tasks.
Routine tasks are just a cost of keeping your business functioning. For example, setting up a new client in your CRM system or approving your monthly staff wage payments. No client will thank you for executing these tasks. And your staff won’t thank you if they have to re-invent the wheel to carry out mundane work that they would like to get done with as little bother as possible.
By contrast, value creating tasks are the arena in which you compete against your peers. Performance here is what determines whether your business is successful.
Even your client-facing staff will be responsible for some routine tasks. For example, salespeople create value by skilfully closing a client sale, gathering feedback from clients about ways to improve your products and so on. But they may also need to approve paperwork related to client orders and contribute to the internal sales budgeting process.
By maximising their efficiency in executing their routine tasks, you can free more of their time for the value adding activities that drive the long-term success of your business.
Empower your staff to do their value-creating work better by spreading best practice
You’ve now mastered the art of guiding your staff to execute their routine tasks efficiently. As a result, they now have more time to spend on value-creating activities, such as such as engaging with customers or developing new products.
How should you make sure that they are carrying out these value-creating tasks as effectively as possible?
At this point, you are well advised to exercise a bit of humility. The knowledge you need may not reside within the management team. Remember that the people who know best how to execute a particular task are usually the people who are doing the job already. They work at the coal face of your business and they know, through experience, what works well and what doesn’t.
But this knowledge is not spread evenly throughout your team. Experienced staff will have years of accumulated know-how in their heads, whereas junior staff will not.
This makes the challenge clearer. Your task is to transfer know-how from the veterans and experts on your team to your recent joiners and those who have been on your staff for longer but have not yet picked up the best habits.
What is the best way to achieve this?
If you sit your staff in a room and read them a list of ‘techniques for improvement’, they will feel like they are being sent back to school. And don’t send them a management e-mail – even if they read it, the format is not engaging and may not be acted on.
The best way is often to pick one of your best people and tell them you would love them to share their ideas and tips (theirs, not yours) on a particular topic with their colleagues. Make sure the topic is one at which they excel. Then set up a round table meeting with the rest of your staff.
This ‘teach in’ format can work wonders. The presenter’s enthusiasm and pride in their own success will radiate around the room and inspire their colleagues in a way that an e-mail from management never can. The information they communicate will be taken more seriously by your staff for coming from one of their peers. And the format is interactive, so everyone will feel they are participating rather than being lectured to.
Spreading best practice represents a process of levelling up – lifting the performance of relative laggards closer to that of your best people. The process works best if your company benefits from a culture in which a win for one person is seen as a win for everyone. If staff feel that they are in a zero sum rivalry with their colleagues, there will be no sharing.
Assuming you have got the right culture in place, good people are almost always happy to share their ideas. Why wouldn’t they be? You are holding them up as examples for their peers to aspire to. You are communicating publicly how much you value their contribution. From the perspective of professional satisfaction, there are few better feelings.
Leveraging the know-how and credibility of your top people to spread best practice can be a highly effective tactic. You can provide your weaker staff with a helping hand towards superior performance without taking away their sense of autonomy. You can empower them without compromising their freedom to do their job in the way that best harnesses their individual strengths.
Put into practice simple people management skills that will draw out the best performance from your managers and staff alike
By now, you have put in place systems that impose efficiency on the routine tasks that your staff perform. You have also created a channel for spreading best practice so that your staff can execute their value-adding activities in the most effective way.
But will your staff use these systems? Will they take advantage of best practice to deliver exceptional results?
If you are to inspire your staff to give their very best performance, you also need to manage them effectively on a personal level. To run your business successfully, you need to put this final piece of the puzzle in place.
Thousands of books have been written on this subject. The right answer varies from company to company according to its unique circumstances, goals and challenges. Does your company operate in a fast-moving industry or a stable one? Are your staff more or less experienced? Are your profits growing strongly or are they under pressure?...
However, some basic principles should apply in almost all circumstances. They arise from the things that motivate us as people, independent of our age, our level of qualifications or any other variable.
I will break the topic down into three parts.
First, how to interact with your staff on a one-to-one basis – how to persuade, motivate and, when necessary, criticise?
There are many good tips and techniques out there for helping you to have effective interactions with your staff. I’m going to share some recommendations from almost a century ago. Much has changed in a century, but I don’t think human motivation is one of them.
In 1937, Dale Carnegie published his book How to win friends and influence people [11]. When I first read this classic book, there was something on almost every page that caused a penny to drop in my mind. I recognised mistakes of my own that have made some of my interactions with other people less effective than they could have been. I saw techniques that other people use that have smoothed out relationships that might otherwise have soured.
In his book, Carnegie sets out 30 principles for how to interact effectively with other people. All of them are simple and all are applicable to anyone in a modern executive role.
I have highlighted below just three of Carnegie’s principles and added my own synopsis of what they mean. They are taken from Part 4 of his book, which he titled: Be a leader: How to change people without giving offense or arousing resentment.
Principle 1: ‘Begin with praise and honest appreciation’
Remember that each of your staff has something they do well – otherwise they wouldn’t be working for you. So give them sincere and honest praise for it when you talk to them. They will carry out your instructions far more willingly and enthusiastically if they know you value their contribution.
Principle 4: ‘Ask questions instead of giving direct orders’
People don’t like being given orders – if repeated often, it’s demeaning. If you ask your staff a question that leads them towards the action you would like, this stimulates their creativity and makes them feel that they themselves came up with the solution that you wanted all along.
Principle 9: ‘Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest’
Your staff are not motivated by what you want – they are motivated by what they want. So empathise with your staff and take time to understand what motivates them. If you want one of them to do something, think about how they will benefit and focus their mind on those benefits.
Second, how should you set targets and expectations for individual staff? In my view, two basic principles apply to this process.
First, goals should be (to use the common acronym) SMART. That is to say, they should be:
Specific: The objective must be clear. There must be no doubt about its meaning.
Measurable: If the objective cannot be quantified, then how will the staff member go about achieving it? And at the end of the performance period, a qualitative target leaves open the possibility of dispute about whether it has been achieved or not.
Achievable: Stretch targets are fine, but if the staff member believes the target is completely unattainable, they will be demotivated and may not even try to reach it.
Relevant: There is little point setting someone a target that will not impact the goals that you have for them or for their part of the business.
Time bound: Any target needs to have a date by which you would like it to be achieved.
Second, you should involve your staff in the process of setting their goals. Of course, staff should not be able to set their own goals. But have a discussion beforehand – don’t just hand them a set of targets out of the blue.
People generally strive to achieve objectives that they have mentally taken ownership of. If they commit to trying to do something, they normally try their hardest to do it. If you issue them with targets without any consultation at all, they may not buy into them and the firm’s performance may be the poorer for it.
Third and finally, what help should a manager provide to staff to help them reach their goals?
If someone is struggling, the right response depends on their level of experience:
Junior staff need coaching and guidance from their manager. You can’t adopt a sink-or-swim approach if someone cannot yet be expected to have accumulated the skills they need to do their job. But don’t micro-manage them or they will delegate their work upwards to you.
If more experienced staff are struggling with an issue, think about organising a series of teach-ins from your best people (see the section above on spreading best practice). If this doesn’t help, they may not be the right fit for your company.
Beyond effective person-to-person interaction with their staff, there is one more thing that managers should do to help staff be productive. This is what Zena Everett has memorably described as ‘lawnmower management’ [12]. With this phrase, she refers to the responsibility of a manager to clear roadblocks out of the way so that staff can get their jobs done.
Modern offices abound with obstacles to efficient work. For example, unreliable IT infrastructure, open plan office noise and managers who keep staff idle while they wait for approvals or feedback. Preventable barriers to business efficiency are not only financially costly. They also send a message to staff that the company doesn’t value their time, which is disrespectful and demotivating.
To run your business successfully, you must make sure that you are not asking your staff to do their jobs with one hand tied behind their backs. Ms Everett sees ‘lawnmower management’ as one of the most crucial roles of any manager and I agree.
[1] Drucker, P. (1999) The Effective Executive. Oxford & Burlington MA, Butterworth-Heinemann. This classic book can be bought at all good book shops. For more about Peter Drucker’s ideas and work, see https://www.drucker.institute/ .
[2] Everett, Z. (2021) The Crazy Busy Cure. Boston MA, Nicholas Brealey Publishing. For Zena Everett’s profile and her books, see https://www.zenaeverett.com/ .
[3] Our collective failure to use technology to boost business productivity is visible in national productivity statistics too. As far back as 1987, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow observed that ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ Things don’t seem to have changed. For example, productivity has barely risen across the UK economy over the past decade despite the spread of cloud computing, big data, machine learning, the Internet of Things and so on.
[4] Allen, D. (2001) Getting Things Done. US, Viking Penguin. The book is available from all good book shops. For David Allen’s corporate website, see: https://gettingthingsdone.com/ .
[5] Pozen, R. (2012) Extreme Productivity. New York NY, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. For Robert Pozen’s profile, see his biography on the website of the MIT Sloan School of Management, where is a Senior Lecturer https://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/directory/robert-c-pozen . For Bob Pozen’s various books, see: https://bobpozen.com/index.html .
[6] Hyatt, M. (2019) Free to Focus. Grand Rapids MI, Baker Books. For Michael Hyatt’s profile and his various books, see his corporate website: https://fullfocus.co/ .
[7] Covey, S. R. (1989) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. US, Simon & Shuster. Dr. Covey died in 2012. His books are available from all good book shops. For the corporate website of the company into which Dr. Covey merged his consulting firm, see: https://www.franklincovey.com/ .
[8] Wickman, G. (2011) Traction. Dallas TX, BenBella Books, Inc. For Gino Wickman’s profile and his other books, see: https://ginowickman.com/ .
[9] Jenyns, D. (2020) SYSTEMology. Victoria, SYSTEMology. For David Jenyns’ profile, see: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-jenyns/ . For his books, see his corporate website: https://www.systemology.com/ .
[10] Gerber, M. (1995) The E-Myth Revisited. New York NY, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. The book is available from all good book shops. For Michael Gerber’s profile, see: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelegerber/ . You can find his corporate website here: https://www.michaelegerbercompanies.com/ .
[11] Carnegie, D. (1937) How to Win Friends and Influence People. London, Penguin Random House. The book is available from all good book shops. Dale Carnegie died in 1955. For a profile of his life and career, see: https://www.bl.uk/people/dale-carnegie .
[12] Everett, Z. (2021) The Crazy Busy Cure. Boston MA, Nicholas Brealey Publishing. For Zena Everett’s profile and her books, see https://www.zenaeverett.com/.