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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBO Ideacast from Harvard Business Review.

I'm Andy O'Connell.

I'm talking today with Michael Manchins, a partner at Bain and co-author of the new

HBO article,

your scarcest resource.

Michael, welcome to the program.

Thanks so much for having me, Andy.

I love the idea that time is such a scarce resource but isn't managed at least not on an

organizational level what can an organization do to help conserve this

valuable resource?

Well, I think first and foremost, they can actually start by understanding where

organizational time is currently deployed.

I think when we work with large organizations it's amazing I guess but probably not that

surprising that organizations don't actually know how the collective time of their executives and teams is actually being spent.

So the first part is providing information about how the organization is devoting its time.

And that same data set provides input that can be used for what we call real-time feedback.

So if you know as an executive how much load you're putting on

the company and what we mean by load is meetings that you schedule, data requests that you make, people can start modifying

...