Having also run eBay in the late 1990s, when it was a tiny, fast-growing enterprise with just 30 employees, Whitman has a keen understanding of the special challenges that entrepreneurs face. Here she shares five helpful tactics for entrepreneurs who are short of time — and unseasoned when it comes to time management.
1. Concentrate on your strengths.
“I try to figure out what I’m uniquely good at–and surround mysel f with people who are really good at what I’m not good at. My partnership with former eBay CTO Maynard Webb was perfect–one plus one equaled seven. At HP, Bill Veghte, the COO, and I have a very good complementary partnership. Having grown up in the enterprise, he knows it incredibly well and is deep from a technology perspective. I’m very good on strategy, market segmentation, communications and leading the charge.”
2. Recalibrate your priorities weekly.
2. Recalibrate your priorities weekly.
“I constantly check the to-do list. Every Sunday night I ask myself, What do we have to get done? What did we think was important last week? What can go away? If an old priority isn’t so important anymore, but a new one is, how are we going to get there from here? With my calendar on my laptop I go out three or four months–and work backwards from there. That’s helpful. It’s very iterative.”
3. Walk away from gridlock.
3. Walk away from gridlock.
“If we’re off on a really bad tangent, I’ll hand a project back to the team. Even though there is a piece of me that thinks, ‘If I spend another five hours on this I’m sure I could make a difference.’ I’m always looking for the right person to solve a problem. I only have so much time.”
4. Next !
4. Next !
“I keep meetings under control because I’m literally scheduled back-to-back from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m. That’s a natural forcing function that prevents things from running over.”
5. Measure the right things.
5. Measure the right things.
“We spent quite a bit of time asking, ‘What are the things we need to measure?’ Customer loyalty, on-time product launches, percentage of volume through the channel, average selling prices, attach rates of software to hardware and so forth. The result is the dashboards we’ve developed. I get them once a week, and they’re pretty helpful because, as the old adage goes, you focus on what you measure. They serve as early-warning indicators, too: If you start to see some things going south, then you can get in front of them. It’s a road map that will really help us run the company.”
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