A person may be a good time manager but this does not necessarily means that he or she is a time master too. This book tries to provide answers to queries like how do you view time? Is your calendar your best friend or worst enemy? Does a clock steadily tick at the back of your mind? Is your idea of time well spent is sailing through a highly scheduled day without too many interruptions? Not really good enough. Only by making the transition from management to mastery can one transform the elements of time into a potent leadership tool.
Leaders who display a deeper understanding of time exhibit what is known as “temporal intelligence”. Like emotional intelligence, it is a competency that can make the difference between being a run-of-the-mill leader or a great one. True time masters develop an intuitive sense of time, seeing it as relative and malleable rather than as a constant, uninterruptible force.
Step by step, this book makes you discover how to cultivate the seven behaviours that transform time from a management problem to a leadership opportunity:
It tells you to reset the internal clock. One must keep two sets of temporal books—outer-directed and inter-directed to help assess accurately when the time is ripe.
One must get and set the organisation’s tempo. It is unusual when individual, departmental and organisational tempos do not clash. Hence synchronisation techniques have to be learnt.
The stream of time must be navigated—going with the flow is not easy, but when one learns to treat time as a continuous flow, one can reach “the zone” of peak experience.
The past and future is celebrated by “managing in the moment; and beyond the moment.” By thinking like a historian but moving forward like a futurist, one can direct the journey.
Elasticity should be observed for which one need not be an Einstein to appreciate that time is relative. Ways to speed up seconds, slow down minutes and even stop whole hours at a time must be discovered.
One needs to go beyond calendars and clocks. Events, not second hands, create real time. The power of unscheduled moments and fast-approaching tipping points must be harnessed.
Time should be energised and not enervated. Your beliefs need to be aligned with science. Evolution demonstrates that things actually improve over time. The chaos theory reveals that systems in distress have the innate ability to self-organise and heal.
This book teaches one to stop seeing time as a fixed, rigid constant and how to truly take control of it. The best part of the book is that it makes use of real-life examples of leaders whose mastery over time has paved the way for incredible business breakthroughs at big organisations. John and Scott present a view of time that is about ‘right moments’ and rhythms, values and motivations, elasticity and relativity. It could help you see how you can stretch time, stop it, speed it up, slow it down and even create more of it.
(Macmillan Publishers India Ltd, 2/10, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110 002.)
