Who's designing the future of your company while you're managing the present?
A CEO's calendar tells the strategy better than any three-year plan. When the top's time gets entirely consumed by execution, the future of the company stops being a project and becomes inertia.
The calendar test
Porter (yes, him, still him) and Nohria, in a study lasting twelve years on twenty-seven CEOs of large companies, tracked sixty thousand hours of activity in fifteen-minute intervals. The sharpest result: 72% of a CEO's time ends up in meetings. 36% of the entire working week is spent in reactive mode, responding to problems as they emerge. Only 21% of the time goes to strategy. Jeff Bezos had figured it out with the two-pizza rule: a meeting can't have more people than two pizzas can feed. But judging by Amazon today, even there things have slipped out of hand.
These numbers describe CEOs of companies with average revenues of 13 billion dollars, with support staff, chiefs of staff, structured executive committees. In an Italian SME with 30, 50 or 100 million in revenue, the situation is worse. The entrepreneur or managing director handles the major client, steps in on production, attends the trade fairs, signs off on hires, supervises investments, manages the relationship with the bank. Strategy is reduced to fragmented conversations between one urgency and the next.
The calendar tells the truth that the three-year plan hides. If an outside observer looked at the top's agenda over the last month and had to infer the strategic priorities from it, what would they conclude?
Leader or manager? The cost of not choosing
A study published in January 2025 by Bandiera, Sadun and colleagues from Harvard Business School, the London School of Economics and Columbia takes the issue onto even more concrete ground. Analyzing 4,800 CEOs of manufacturing companies in 42 countries, the researchers distinguish two behavioral profiles: the CEO who acts as a leader, dedicating time to strategic, multifunctional interactions with top management and with the outside; the CEO who acts as a manager, focused on operations, production and one-on-one meetings with the functions.
The figure that matters: manufacturing companies led by leader-profile CEOs have productivity 12% higher than those led by manager-profile CEOs. The mismatch between what the company needs and what the CEO does costs up to 20% of productivity. In a company with 80 million in revenue, 20% of lost productivity isn't a theoretical inefficiency; it's margin that evaporates, growth that fails to materialize, investments that don't pay off.
The question isn't whether the CEO is good or not. The question is whether their time is going where the company needs it. In many Italian manufacturing SMEs, the top behaves as a manager because the organization isn't designed to function any other way. No one can take care of strategy because everyone is busy keeping the machine running. The CEO stays stuck in execution, not by choice, but for lack of structural alternatives.
Day-to-day operations as a structural trap
The mechanism is circular. The company grows, adds products, clients, markets, people. The organizational structure stays still. Decision flows remain centralized because no one has redesigned delegations and responsibilities. Critical information passes through a handful of people. The CEO becomes the mandatory junction point for every decision that goes beyond routine.
The more the company grows, the more the CEO gets sucked in. The more they get sucked in, the less time is left to look outward: reading the market, anticipating client movements, understanding where the supply chain is heading, identifying risks and opportunities that require months of preparation. The future stops being a choice and becomes whatever happens while no one is looking.
This trap has a cost that doesn't appear on any balance sheet. It's the cost of the opportunities not seen, of the signals not read, of the decisions postponed until they turn into emergencies. It's the cost of arriving at the client's, the partner's, the potential acquirer's table three years late on the conversation that would have changed the trajectory.
Who looks outward while everyone looks inward
The Yale study on SMEs confirms the pattern from another angle. CEOs of small and medium-sized companies report dedicating most of their time to operational problems and people management. Strategy is the activity they find most rewarding, and the one they practice least. A paradox explained by a recurring phrase among those interviewed: first I'll sort out operations, then I'll have time for strategy.
That moment doesn't come. Operations never get sorted out enough to free up strategic time, because strategic time is exactly what's needed to design an organization in which operations don't depend on the top. The CEO who is waiting to have time to think about the future is waiting for an event that only strategic thinking could generate.
The solution doesn't lie in time management. It lies in organizational design. What's needed is to build a structure in which operational decisions descend to where the information sits, in which decision flows are clear without all of them passing through the top, in which there exists a function, or at least a routine, dedicated to looking outward: reading signals, building scenarios, preparing tomorrow's choices.
Three questions for measuring the problem
An exercise we often suggest to the leadership teams we work with: take the calendar from the last quarter and classify each block of time into three categories. Time spent on activities only the CEO can do (irreversible decisions, strategic relationships, governance). Time spent on activities the CEO does because no one else is ready to do them. Time spent on activities the CEO does out of habit, or for lack of structured delegation.
In most cases, the first category takes up less than 20% of the agenda. The second reveals where the organization has gaps in capability or in mandate. The third shows the organizational debt accumulated over the years: all the decisions about how the internal workings should run that no one has made, because the system seemed to be holding up just as it was.
The point isn't that the CEO is working too much. The point is that the system consumes the top's time to compensate for an organizational design that was never put in place. Every hour the CEO spends resolving a conflict between functions, validating a commercial offer, or unblocking an order, is an hour taken away from building the future of the company.
The future as an organizational function
Companies that design their future intentionally do one specific thing: they treat the work on the future as an organizational function, not as a residual activity of the top. They dedicate resources, structured time and specific people to reading the context, exploring scenarios, and preparing strategic choices.
This doesn't necessarily mean creating a strategy department. For many SMEs it's a disproportionate investment. It means, rather, building governance rituals that force the organization to stop periodically and look outward. A monthly meeting of the leadership core dedicated exclusively to signals of change and positioning choices, without an operational agenda. An external partner who brings perspective and method. A small team that gathers and organizes the information the top doesn't have time to look for.
The format matters less than the principle. The principle is that the company's future deserves dedicated, protected, structured time. If that time doesn't exist on the agenda, the future doesn't exist in the strategy.
The real productivity question
The research by Bandiera and Sadun on 4,800 manufacturing companies offers a figure that makes the issue very concrete: the mismatch between the CEO's behavioral profile and the company's needs costs up to 20% of productivity. The most important productivity question for an Italian manufacturing company isn't about the factory, the automation, or the management software. It's about how the top spends its hours.
A CEO who dedicates 80% of their time to operations is implicitly deciding that the company's future is worth less than 20% of the scarcest and most expensive resource in the organization. If this allocation isn't intentional, it's the symptom of an organization that hasn't been designed to grow beyond its current phase.