277: Life Happens. Make Plans.

Life is what happens to you
While you’re busy making other plans
John Lennon, Beautiful Boy

Dear Friends

You are young and life is long
And there is time to kill today
And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun

Pink Floyd’s Time was released in 1973.

In December, the New York Times Dealbook gathered six CEOs – Alex Chriss of PayPal; Beth Ford of Land O’Lakes Inc.; Bob Jordan of Southwest Airlines; Ynon Kreiz of Mattel; Emma Walmsley of GlaxoSmithKline; and Pete Nordstrom of Nordstrom – to discuss ‘The New Rules of Leadership’.

What did they say?

“Time is the only resource we can’t make more of. I say ‘no’ often to stick to the discipline of what is actually most important” (Alex Chriss).

Bob Jordan said it is easy “to confuse busyness and going to meetings with leadership.’’

It is indeed a persistent and confusing feature of modern leadership – how many of us wear the ‘I was in back-to-back meetings all day’ badge, despite persistent evidence that it is the least effective way to work.

For 2026, Jordan plans to keep his afternoons free from Wednesday through Friday, to do almost prosaic things, “thinking about what’s important right now” and calling people “you need to talk to.’’

He is on the money. I see this repeatedly: when we carve out the time for intentional deep work and connection, our impact and effectiveness increase in a matter of weeks.

Last week, on 19 January, PWC released its 29th Global CEO Survey: Leading through uncertainty in the age of AI. It is based on responses from 4,454 chief executives across 95 countries and territories.

Amongst its many insights – 56% of CEOs say they’ve yet to realise any benefit from AI expenditure, only 30% are very or extremely confident about their company’s revenue prospects (the lowest since Jan 2020, before COVID broke: 27%) – PWC observes:

“Counterintuitively, CEOs who say the company’s mid- to long-term viability is one of the most pressing questions they face also say they spend more time than others on activities associated with time horizons of less than a year. If these leaders are serious about reinvention, they may need to reinvent how they invest their time.”

Counterintuitive, yes. Surprising? Not so much.

One of my most powerful tactics is to get executive teams to calculate how they spent the last week and month. Laptops and phones get opened. Diaries get tallied.

Note: they’re calculating it in real time. They don’t immediately know the answer. My view? They should.

Then, I ask, in what long-standing clients refer to as one of my asshole coach moves, “How does this time use compare to your strategic priorities?” It almost never aligns.

It is a simple exercise. Do it for your company. Do it for yourself.

The lives we create result from our intentions with time. 

The 4,454 CEOs in PWC’s survey, on average, dedicate about half (47%) of their time to activities with time horizons of less than one year, a third (37%) of their time on activities with horizons of one to five years, with the remainder (16%) devoted to longer-term issues.

There are differences of course: Chinese Mainland CEOs spend significantly more time than the global average on activities with medium- and long-term horizons (49% and 28%, respectively).

What is unsurprising is this: “CEOs are seeking growth opportunities outside of their sectors. More than 40% say their companies have started to compete in new sectors in the last five years. Among those planning large acquisitions over the next three years, four in ten expect to do deals in other sectors or industries.”

Of course, the evidence is mostly against the success of large-scale ex-sector acquisition yielding returns for anyone other than advisors (see, for example, Oxford economist John Kay’s The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century: Why (almost) everything we are told about business is wrong). But, if you’re short-term focused, buying success does seem like a viable strategy (If you want a master class in additive sector-adjacent acquisition, read Disney CEO Bob Iger’s Ride of a Lifetime or Lafley and Martin’s Playing to Win).

This fascinated me: “Companies experiencing the fewest trust concerns delivered total shareholder returns over a 12-month period that were, on average, nine percentage points higher than those experiencing the most trust concerns”.

Again, not too surprising. Companies are ultimately social constructs. Yes, there’s technology and contracts and agreements and systems and processes and buildings, but in the final analysis, when all is said and done, companies succeed and die because of social connection. And that rests, in part, on what Bob Jordan plans to do with his Wednesday-Friday afternoons: conversation.

As Jim Collins, channelling Peter Drucker, once said, “Count Your Time and Make it Count”.

[Click here for a few more time-focused newsletters].

All the best

Karl

PS: You can learn about my executive coaching practice [here] and find me on LinkedIn. If you’re interested in embedding learning that compounds into your company culture, I curate and facilitate leadership learning communities and experiences. The details are [here].