Question

Describe “Clock Time” and how it might be employed in company strategy?

Answer 1

• Knowing what to pay your employees. This is an obvious use, but tracking your employees' time accurately and efficiently means you'll pay them exactly what they've earned--nothing more and nothing less.

• Keeping employees on task. Knowing that their time is being tracked will help keep your employees focused and on task for longer stretches, yielding higher productivity and satisfaction.

• Maintaining a paper trail. Keeping track of your employees' working habits and tasks also gives you a reliable paper trail if you ever need to prove the hours spent on something.

• Learning points of inefficiency. Gleaning insights from your time-tracking data, you'll be able to learn points of inefficiency within your organization and correct them, making your business more efficient.

• Saving time. Easy time-tracking software also means your employees will spend less time messing with an inefficient system.

It might be hard to understand the term until you experience it firsthand.

When my father-in-law had an unexpectedly difficult time recuperating from surgery last summer, I was stunned at just how upside-down it turned our lives.

If you’ve been through the prolonged hospitalization (or any other intense, sustained medical treatment) of a family member, you know: You may become an honorary nursing aide—or at least a frequent overnight guest at the medical facility.

It’s quite an adjustment, especially when the anxiety sets in: How will I be able to get back to work?

Having the privilege of a self-directed, flexible workplace provided a bit of peace during months of stress and uncertainty.

A successful portfolio-of-initiatives strategy involves creating enough initiatives offering high returns relative to the risks taken to enable a company to meet its aspirations and outperform the expectations of the capital markets. The process requires the CEO and the management team to keep an open mind about where the company might be headed. Inherent in this approach is the understanding that future decisions and future outcomes are likely to vary enormously from initial hypotheses. The whole process resembles art more than science. Most of the critical decisions involve subjective judgments that, unlike those generated by more deterministic strategies, will be informed by not just the highest-quality staff work but also the knowledge gained as time passes.

There is, of course, no substitute for the talent of a top-management team. But the advantage of the portfolio-of-initiatives approach is that it is far better at getting the most out of a company's top talent than are traditional approaches to strategy.

Although the world is increasingly complex, confusing, and uncertain, serendipity doesn't have to be more important than skill in the crafting and implementing of corporate strategy. Traditional deterministic approaches to strategy aren't likely to be up to the task of helping companies negotiate these dangerous waters, but executives need not put the fate of their businesses entirely in the hands of chance. As the global environment continually changes and risk levels rise, a portfolio-of-initiatives approach holds out the opportunity for corporations to be as flexible and adaptive as the markets themselves.