PTW/PI All-Stars Book Club – Chapter Ten
Being ‘Too Busy’ Means Your Personal Strategy Sucks
Welcome to Chapter Ten of the Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) book club. In the spirit of a book club discussion, I have responded to all previous comments and will continue to do so. Of the 37 all-star pieces out of the 260 in the series, the randomizer picked Being ‘Too Busy’ Means Your Personal Strategy Sucks as the tenth chapter. This one is the first piece from the second smallest category – personal development in the domain of strategy. You can find the whole PTW/PI series here.
My Reflections on This Piece
The response to this piece was wildly positive. As I mentioned in my introduction to the PTW/PI Book Club, three pieces received overwhelmingly more combined views/reads/claps than all the rest – and this was one of the three. And of the three, this received the most claps – so it made a lot of readers happy!
Why did it garner such reader support? Part of it was the provocative title, with the ‘your personal strategy sucks’ phrase at the end. But the second reason – I think – is because it was aimed at personal development, which is a big attraction for many readers.
The piece took dead aim at busyness as a badge of honor. It harkens back to the early days of our careers when we longed to have others think that our work was worthy enough to demand a lot of it. If we are good, that phase didn’t last for long because demand for our work quickly met or exceeded our capacity to supply it because we are the only factory in business that can’t be expanded. There are, as they say, only so many hours in a day.
But I think we don’t forget the short phase of underutilization when we longed to be busier. So, busyness remained a badge of honor while it simultaneously became a central challenge of the knowledge economy. Peter Drucker was right in 1959 when he identified and coined the term knowledge worker. These were workers whose primary job was use the muscle between their ears rather than the ones in their backs, arms or legs. As he predicted, they grew to a huge proportion of the workforce, at least to 40% of the workforce by the early 20th century, as shown in work I did with Ricard Florida – and probably 100% of PTW/PI readers!
My view is that these workers have been given a substantial level of independent judgement and decision-making authority, but little guidance on how to acquit it. In that vacuum of advice, they use more work as a solution to the challenge – hence the epidemic of busyness and the Generation Z backlash against it.
For me, the solution is to use the same choice tool for personal strategy as I advocate for company strategy because the problem has similarities. When a company does not have a thoughtful strategy, it tries to do everything, resulting in it working hard without commensurate results. It is the same problem only worse for individuals because they can’t expand their capacity to more hours in the day.
The challenge then is where to allocate your precious and restricted asset – that is, your hours – and with what theory of adding value. That becomes the heart of your personal strategy – where-to-play and how-to-win (WTP/HTW). The second part of that equation – HTW – is, as I have argued for company strategy, is the hardest box on the strategy cascade.
HTW is not a list of good outcomes. For example, I recently had a client say that its HTW was superiority – and it had a very sophisticated definition of what ‘superiority’ entailed. But that isn’t a HTW. It is a desired outcome that would, in fact, be a win. But it isn’t a ‘how to’ – i.e., a theory for how we will achieve superiority over competitors who would all want to prevent us from achieving superiority over them.
In personal strategy, the hardest question is: What is my theory for how I am going to cause my allocation of hours to provide strikingly high value? What does my organization need that I can provide uniquely? That should define the WTP/HTW answer.
In the piece, I used my time as dean at the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto as a case study in personal strategy. I completely restructured my WTP by allocating 100 days/year away from the allocation of previous deans to reinvest that time into a) building the intellectual profile of Rotman outside the academy (we already did just fine within the academy) and b) motivating and mentoring our professors. Both of those new uses of time ended up generating disproportionately high value for the Rotman School. To deliver that value, I needed to build my Must-have Capabilities in writing and public speaking. In the latter, I hired a coach who helped me and I practiced a lot! And my Chief of Staff, Suzanne Spragge, had responsibility for running the Enabling Management System that ensured that I didn’t stray from my targeted WTP allocation of hours.
When I talk about choosing a personal WTP/HTW, many people push back (including some who commented on the article, and I discuss below) and say they don’t have the flexibility necessary to adjust their WTP/HTW. They argue that their job description says exactly what they must do. I have two reactions to that. First, that is the same thing that unsuccessful companies say: We have no choice! The board won’t let us. The capital market won’t let us. The regulators won’t let us. Those are all excuses for continuing to fail. Second, take a look at your job description. Job descriptions in the modern economy are strikingly vague when you look at them carefully. They incorporate lots of independent judgement and decision-making – which leaves plenty of room for selecting your WTP/HTW.
That having been said, I am not morally opposed to people thinking that they have no choice. It helps them feel more comfortable with their lot in life, which is the same with companies who feel most comfortable being mediocre. But even though they think they have no choice, believing that is, in fact, a choice!
Reader Comments
The comments on the article were overwhelmingly positive – if not effusive. However, there were criticisms which I will discuss below. But the praise was extensive: congratulations, awesome, great article, amazing, brilliant, very excellent article, wow: just wow, marvelous, and fantastic insight. Perhaps the cutest (especially for this lover of the book mentioned): Your advice is as valuable as ‘A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.’
There was a lot of resonance with that idea that being busy is considered a badge of honor. One commenter said: Oh my that’s so spot on! People inform me they are busy as if it is a badge of honor. It is a perfect statement of the facts. Numerous others made similar comments.
Many liked the Rotman School example that I used to illustrate the approach in the article. One commented: Win-win. Staff empowerment is often overlooked. Yes, it takes time, but it’s well worth it. And they liked the way I used my personal allocation of time to discourage excuses of others – for example the teaching of a heavy courseload: I love the elimination of excuses by example.
Multiple commenters said they have already incorporated or intend to incorporate their insights from the article into their worklife – and one said likewise for his homelife.
As usual, I like to feature particularly good quotes from the comments. This time one was: So true. I long for the day I get into the elevator at work, ask someone how their day is going and they don’t reply “really busy” but instead say “I’m not that busy today but we’re getting some great outcomes as a team!” The other was: Being busy is a drug way too many people are addicted to.
As I promised above, I will discuss the criticisms. One argued: There are way too many nuances for this to be a one-size-fits-all article. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough in overall comment to understand the criticism and respond to it, but I put it out there. Another argued that it is the wrong conversation and it should be about work obsession. Again, I am not entirely sure how to respond. I think it is very difficult to distinguish between work obsession and a poor personal strategy that causes a diligent but not obsessed person to become overly busy.
The biggest critique, which was repeated three times is that my proposed solution only worked for me because I was at the top of the organization and it wouldn’t work for anyone that isn’t. To them, I just became un-busy by delegating big chunks of my job to my subordinates, and such a tactic is not possible for those not at the top of their organizations.
This is an unsurprising critique. There are always attempts made to deny personal agency and place blame on someone else – in fact, anyone else (as alluded to above). I have two responses to the critique.
First is the notion that since I was on top of the organization, I could dole out all the responsibility I wanted – and do so unimpeded. I wasn’t. I wasn’t even one level down in the University of Toronto hierarchy. I reported to the Provost, who reported to the President. And that Provost didn’t like what I was doing to shift official University of Toronto Dean responsibilities to my CAO and Vice-Dean Academic. In fact, at first, he refused. I had to work hard to convince him that doing so would not damage the faculty and by implication the university. And if you would have asked the President whether he could assign responsibility in any way he wanted because he was ‘at the top of the university’ he would laugh hysterically and explain the role of the Governing Council of the University. Nobody has unfettered ability to apportion responsibility.
This flows directly into my second response which is that nobody gets very far in this world without assuming personal agency. If you make the argument that you are too far down the hierarchy to be expected to demonstrate personal agency, you are going to be ‘too far down the hierarchy’ for a long time, if not forever. The critique suggests that only people high in the hierarchy have a choice. Nope. Everybody does. Some just choose to not exercise it.
Without further ado, the original article…
Chapter Ten
People inform me they are busy as if it is a badge of honor. For me, it is a signal that they have a weak personal Playing to Win strategy. To explain why, my 7th Year III Playing to Win Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece discusses Being ‘Too Busy’ Means Your Personal Strategy Sucks: You Need a Better Where-to-Play/How-to-Win. You can find the previous 117 PTW/PI here.
Busyness in the Knowledge Economy
The essential unit of production in the knowledge economy is the human, and that unit has a couple of tricky features. First, its capacity is limited. It has only so many hours of the day to produce. Unlike a factory or mine or farm that can be expanded, its capacity is fixed. Second, each unit of production is unique, and hence not entirely fungible. When you expand a factory, you can add another production line that is identical to the other lines in the factory and thereby increase capacity in a homogeneous, seamless way. It is not possible to do in the knowledge economy. Organizations expand capacity by adding another unit of production — i.e., another person — but as much as the organization would wish, the addition isn’t homogenous or seamless. At a minimum, both the original person and the new person have to spend lots of time meeting with one another to coordinate their activities.
There's a version of busyness I see that isn't a time management failure, it's a structural one.
The leader who fills every hour with meetings is often a leader whose intent doesn't travel well without them. Remove them from the room and the decision goes differently, the priority shifts, the interpretation drifts. They're there because the organisation hasn't fully absorbed what they know. The gap between intent and execution runs through them rather than around them.
Personal strategy is a transmission problem. A leader who has transferred enough of what they know into the people around them doesn't need to be everywhere, the organisation already knows which way to move. A leader who hasn't is the most load-bearing node in the system, which is why it collapses when they step back.
Is a leader who has done this right most visible in what they don't attend, or in what the organisation does when they're not in the room?
Staying 'too busy' is often just quietly accepting your place in the hierarchy - the organizational one, the societal one, or both. It's the individual version of what failing companies tell themselves: "We have no choice. The board won't let us. The market won't let us. The regulators won't let us." Comfortable excuses dressed up as constraints.
Breaking out of that requires a qualitative shift in how you approach winning - because your 24-hour day cannot be expanded. Period.
I've met plenty of people grinding 12–18 hours a day, six days a week. Total commitment to quantity. And without exception, exhaustion eventually caught up with them. It always does. The body and mind have their own board of directors, and they will overrule you.
For anyone who has already hit that quantity ceiling - and most serious people do - qualitative change isn't optional. It's the only exit.
Change something today.