A short interview/transcript excerpt (SalesGlobe Sage interviewing Mike Figliuolo) discussing the importance of scheduling regular "think time" for executives. Figliuolo argues leaders must clear calendars of low-value meetings and reserve an uninterrupted two-hour weekly block to enable deep, strategic thinking; without it organizations risk falling behind.
Chapters
So that's big brain stuff, right? So a lot of people watching this are probably like, you know, Mike, that's cool, but I don't have the time for this. And I don't know that people are going to tolerate that. But how do you do that within a company? Is it done in strategic planning sessions or. You know, a lot of times I always talk about the idea that you come up with these great ideas in the shower, right. Or you're, you know, mowing the lawn or whatever and you're doing these combinations, these random combinations and all of a sudden, bam, things hit. Right. But how do you do this within an organization where people have their day jobs and how do you get them to pull out to do that kind of thinking?
Yeah, I mean, every time I hear the, oh, we don't have time to do that, immediate response for me is, you don't have time to not do that. Right. And I know that's a double negative, but you know what I mean? So we could sit here and say, oh, we don't have time to think about the future. We're too busy with this quarter's quota or this week's quota and this week's reports. And it's like, okay, but if you don't take that time and you constantly are just pushing things off and procrastinating, you're going to come to that point of the comeuppance where the world changed. You didn't realize it was changing and now you're way behind the curve. So for me, I'm always encouraging. I do a bunch of exec coaching and one of the first things I do is try to get 20, try to get the execs to clear their calendar. And by that I mean get all the junk off there. The recurring meetings, the meetings they shouldn't be in. And once they clear some of that stuff off, then putting in blocks of what I call think time. And think time is two hours at least once a week. And it's gotta be a two hour block, not like four 30 minute blocks. I'm talking like a chunk of two hours. And it's called think time. And you do it away from, well, when we were in offices, you do it away from the office so you can't be, you know, interrupted. And that time is just to think about these types of things. There is no deliverable coming out of think time. So there's no expectation that you come out with a deck or an idea or recommendation. And the reason it's got to be two hours is it's going to take you 15 minutes to decompress from whatever you were doing the last 15 minutes. You're going to consolidate your thoughts and get ready for whatever you're going to next. And it takes you a good 30 minutes to really get into some deep thinking. So that gives you at least 45 minutes to really think about an issue and bang it around. And if you're doing that every week around different sets of issues, all of a sudden you're finding those opportunities and you're realizing, gee, I'm really not missing that much. By doing the sales report and looking at a trend line that's up by 1%, who cares? That's not what's really important.
