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The People Thing

Enhancing human performance now appears to be even more important to CEOs and CIOs than automating business processes. But are they executing?
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At Microsoft's CEO Summit this May, Bill Gates took a few moments to talk about time management. He noted that, somehow, his calendar seemed to be filled with commitments that - upon reflection - only seemed like a good idea at the time. In retrospect, he had been foolish to make them.

Things changed for the better, he said, when he began sharing his calendar with his colleague - and now Microsoft Chief Executive Officer - Steve Ballmer. "Steve would ask me why I would want to schedule that and I would look at his calendar to review what he was spending time on," Gates recalled. This peer review, he observed, made both of them more efficient, more effective and more collaborative time managers.

This struck me as a singularly intriguing way for a pair of colleagues to challenge and get more value from each other. How many C-suite executives have the kind of relationships where they can do a peer review of each other's calendars? How much more value could be gained by this kind of reality check on intended priorities versus actual time spent?

This vignette resonates well with a theme increasingly articulated from CEOs worldwide. For decades, CIOs have sold IT as an investment to boost the strategic and operational competitiveness of their firms. That's a good thing. With Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, networked CAD and VoIP, IT's internal value proposition has expanded to embrace enhanced communications within the enterprise. That's also a good thing.

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More about: Bill, HIS Limited, Microsoft, MIT, MIT Media Lab, Vignette

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