Notes from 2/3–9/3

AI

Microsoft DoWhy is an Open Source Framework for Causal Reasoning

Okay might be useful for capstone. (takes notes)

Blockchain

A Deeper Look Into Microsoft’s Stack to Bring Tokenization to Enterprise Blockchain Applications

Exploring Commit-Reveal Schemes on Ethereum

Probably can put under patterns?

Data

Visualizing Topic Models with Scatterpies and t-SNE

Okay next time I do my topic clustering I’ll use this.

Leadership

How CEOs Manage Time

Because this is paywalled, I will be more detailed here.

The leaders in our study worked 9.7 hours per weekday, on average. They also conducted business on 79% of weekend days, putting in an average of 3.9 hours daily, and on 70% of vacation days, averaging 2.4 hours daily. As these figures show, the CEO’s job is relentless.

Seems like an average engineering student works like a CEO! (or at least amongst my friends)

They slept, on average, 6.9 hours a night, and many had regular exercise regimens, which consumed about 9% of their nonwork hours (or about 45 minutes a day).

Seems like people still manage to get sufficient sleep.

We paid special attention to the 25% of time — or roughly six hours a day — when CEOs were awake and not working. Typically, they spent about half those hours with their families, and most had learned to become very disciplined about this. Most also found at least some hours (2.1 a day, on average) for downtime, which included everything from watching television and reading for pleasure, to hobbies like photography.

Also it seems that social/personal time isn’t as rare as it looks.

Most of our CEOs (89%) spent some time on crises. Though on average it was small (1% of work time during the quarter we tracked), the total amount spent varied a great deal among the leaders in our study. Crises can create make-or-break moments in a CEO’s leadership. In dealing with them, CEOs need to be highly visible and personally involved; the response to such events can’t be delegated.

I suppose this means that most CEOs interviewed are doing well. A CEO flitting from crisis to crisis must have either inherited some disaster or the operational processes are totally out of whack.

A surprisingly significant fraction (11%, on average) of our CEOs’ work time was consumed by routine duties. Such activities varied considerably across CEOs, running the gamut from review meetings to board meetings, earnings calls, and investor days.

Ultimately these are key meetings that keep a company going though.

In our study about half (46%) of a CEO’s time with internal constituencies was spent with one or more direct reports, and 21% of it was spent only with direct reports. The total time spent with direct reports ranged from a low of 32% of time with internal constituencies to a high of 67%. When we explored that variation, we found that CEOs were more likely to spend time with their reports present when they had greater confidence in them.

I always thought one should spend more time with their direct reports. After awhile that’s how a command chain works.

Not surprisingly, the CEOs in our study spent less time with lower-level managers (14%, on average) and even less time with rank-and-file employees (about 6%, on average). However, our research suggests that effective CEOs need to be careful to maintain a human face in the organization. They must stay approachable and find ways to meaningfully engage with employees at all levels.

Maybe people don’t think this is a meaningful use of time. But knowing what’s happening seems really important.

The most powerful integrating mechanisms include strategy (on which CEOs in our study spent an average of 21% of their work time), functional and business unit reviews (25% of their time), developing people and relationships (25% of their time), matching organizational structure and culture with the needs of the business (16% of their time), and mergers and acquisitions (4% of their time).

Interesting that these activities are called “integrating mechanisms”

On average, the leaders in our study had 37 meetings of assorted lengths in any given week and spent 72% of their total work time in meetings.

37 meetings in a week is ridiculous. This means about 7.4 meetings each workday. For a typical 8h working day, how on earth do they find time for anything else?

One-on-one meetings were the most common (accounting for 42% of CEOs’ meetings, on average), followed by meetings with two to five participants (21%). Although every CEO had meetings involving large groups of 50 or more — like town halls, leadership off-sites, or all-company meetings — these were infrequent (5% of meetings).

I suppose on average it’s just easier to talk to people one on one

The vast majority of our CEOs’ time (75%, on average) was scheduled in advance. The CEOs initiated more than half (51%) of their meetings themselves.

Also it means most meetings were taken on by themselves?

In our study, CEOs spent 28% of their work time alone, on average — but again, that varied a great deal, from a low of 10% to a high of 48%. Unfortunately, too much of this alone time (59% of it) was fragmented into blocks of an hour or less; too little (18%) was in blocks of two hours or longer. CEOs need to cordon off meaningful amounts of alone time and avoid dissipating it by dealing with immediate matters, especially their in-boxes.

This seems to contradict slightly. How can you have so many meetings but still have time alone? Probably lots of meetings were very short.

Most of our CEOs were dismayed to discover how little time they spent with their customers — just 3%, on average. It surprised some even more to learn that this was less than the amount they spent with consultants.