I just read a Harvard Business Review article called Stop Wasting Valuable Time, by Michael C. Mankins (Reprint number RO4O9C). It was pretty interesting.

The author did a study of how the senior managers of big corporations use their limited time together.

The sample included 187 companies with at least $1 billion in market capitalization. On average, the senior management teams spent 250 hours a year together.

By nonprofit standards that seems huge, but then he broke it down further. 27 hours were spent on crises of the moment (sound familiar?), 22 hours on personnel issues, 11 hours on team building, and so on. In the end, only 37 hours were spent on strategy—that’s just three hours a month!

Again, that seems like a luxury in the nonprofit world, where it is hard enough to grab an hour with colleagues here and there to discuss crises. However, if we use the percentage of management time spent on strategy as a benchmark, 14.8% in this sample, that might hold true in our sector as well.

For example, let’s say the average management team in a nonprofit large enough to have a management team (say $5M – $10M in revenues) spends 2 hours every other week meeting together. That is about 50 hours a year. In reality, given vacations, and competing priorities, this may be far less. Still, if we take the 14.8% corporations devote to strategy and apply it here, what you get is about 8 hours a year devoted to strategy—or about 40 minutes a month.

If my very unscientific comparison is at all close to reality—and I believe it may well be, nonprofit leaders are devoting far too little time to the real value-added activities they are charged with.

The urgent crowds out the important.

Tags: nonprofit

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 8:24 am and is filed under Leadership, Organizational Effectiveness, Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.