The Productivity Guru

In my more than 36 years of working with executive teams, I used a tool that measured the correlation of how well the various executives at the most senior level, the C-suite, correlated with their CEO on the goals that the CEO had for the organization. In all those years, I was constantly fascinated by how wide the gap was between the executives and their CEO in the priority of those goals.  In many cases it was as much as 100% from the CEO with some of his or her executives.  To be clear if the CEO had as their highest goal to increase sales by 15%, as an example, and all of the other senior managers in the organization had that as the goal but at lower priorities, then the correlations would not be on target and could be as much as 100% away from the CEO.  I have even seen CEO's with goals like the one I mention and the VP of Sales for the same organization whose main goal was to improve the incentive system for the people in his department.  Now the people doing this correlat

The May 2001 issue of The Harvard Business Review has an excellent article called, "Effective Managers Say The Same Thing Twice (or More) http://hbr.org/2011/05/defend-your-research-effective-managers-say-the-same-thing-twice-or-more/ar/1 Research by Tsedal Neeley and Paul Leonardi of Harvard Business School and Northwestern University respectively showed that by shadowing '13 managers in six companies for more than 250 hours....that one of every seven communications by these managers was completely redundant with a previous communication using a different technology.  They also saw that the managers who were deliberately redundant moved their projects forward faster and more smoothly.'  What was also profoundly interesting was that those managers without power planned their redundant communications whereas those with power rarely planned their redundant communications.  Also those without power ensured that there was very little time between the first communication