“Effective Time Management”
Many people know Steve Jobs as the Apple boss whose relentless drive and vision drove the company to become the largest in the world by market capitalization and more recently as one of the world’s highest-valued companies. But fewer are aware of the Apple boss relentless management of time and focus. “Perhaps no other executive managed organizational time more effectively”, wrote Michael Mankins, in his book Time, Talent, Energy: Overcoming Organizational Drag and Unleash Your Team’s Productive Power. “Focus was key to Apple’s success.” Each year Jobs took Apple’s top 100 executives off-site for a planning retreat and pushed them to identify the company’s leading ten priorities for the coming year. Executives jostled to get their ideas on the shortlist. Then Jobs would take a marker and cross out the bottom seven. “We can only do three,” he would announce.