"Thanks to closed doors and fierce gatekeepers, bosses are tricky to observe in their natural habitat. Yet it might be useful to know what they do all day, and whether any of it benefits shareholders. A new HBS orking paper sheds some light.*
Researchers asked the chief executives of 94 Italian firms to have their assistants record their activities for a week. You may take this with a grain of salt. Is the boss’s assistant a neutral observer? If the boss spends his lunch hour boozing, or in a motel with his assistant, will she record this truthfully? Nonetheless, here are the results.
The average Italian boss works for 48 hours a week and spends 60% of that time in meetings. The most diligent put in another 20 hours. And the longer they work, the better the company does. (...)"
Read more : http://www.economist.com/node/18651811?story_id=18651811?fsrc=nlw|mgt|05-11-11|management_thinking
Source : The Economist (paper version)
* Oriana Bandiera, Luigi Guiso, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun, “What Do CEOs Do?” Harvard Business School Working Paper 11-081.