Total Time Management Advice from Peter Drucker, Founder of REX Roundtables for Club Executives

By: Will Phillips
Founder of REX Roundtables for Club Executives

“Much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.”

-Peter Drucker-

Peter Drucker has written more stuff about real management than any other; he will challenge your standard beliefs and push your thinking out of the box. So if you are ready to be pushed, read on.
Most clubs have solid procedures for managing their facility, cash and capital. A club’s total time budget is often unmanaged. Everyone’s time is consumed with phone calls, emails, instant messages, meetings, customer requests, reports and staff conversations. Few clubs have procedures for governing these interactions. Turns out that most clubs have little understanding of how their leaders and staff are spending their collective time. Unsurprisingly, that time can be squandered when organizations become loaded with long email sequences, elaborate meetings and review sessions.
Readily available advice for managing time focus on an individual’s actions. Yet even when an individual is using these tools well, their best intentions can be overwhelmed by the demands and practices of their club business. Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel said ‘you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of equipment, and you shouldn’t let anyone walk away with your time.’
The authors of this research by Bain and Company analyzed the time budgets of 17 large corporations. They found all were all awash in email communications, involved with an ever growing number of meetings, and that collaboration across departments and between headquarters and remote sites. Too often the communication that that occurred was for sharing and collecting information rather than solving problems and making improvements. In addition they found dysfunctional meeting behavior on the rise. For example, meetings often begin with members who have not individually prepared, involve unnecessary people and drag on and on. Then at the end there is no debrief or lessons learned about making the meeting better with specific changes and improvements. One study of large companies revealed that a quarter of the participants sent an average of three emails per half hour in meetings. Lastly, requests for people’s time are easy to make and there is little review of the value.
In the span of four decades from the 1970s to today the number of communications per executive annually has risen 30 times.
The comments from close to 100 club owners in this industry for close to 25 years tell me that the average well run, profitable club is wasting about 10% of its organization time at a low estimate; some may be as high as 20%. This means you are leaving 10-20% of your labor costs on the table when they could be profits. It also means that problems are not surfaced or fixed fast, that employees may not be fully present and committed when at work, and that the owner is frustrated about how some things happen the way they do.
REX Roundtables improves the performance of over 100 clubs whose owners and executives are members of one of our Roundtables. That is our sole purpose. We bring together 12-15 owners/top executives in the club industry to act like an informal board of directors. Sharing, challenging, and caring for one another. Each Roundtable meets three times a year and has continuous interaction between meetings to solve problems, find information and hold one another accountable. No competitors, the same members year after year build the trust for deep honesty.

And don’t forget to request the FREE REX Follow up on SIX PRACTICES FOR MANAGING ORGANIZATONAL TIME. Remember this is totally different than individual time management skills.