Decision ownership
Ownership records show where routine operating decisions stop before escalation and where evidence before restructuring remains unresolved.
Workforce Economics Collection
Routine operating escalation consumes senior attention through repeated approvals, unresolved ownership, decision delay, and rework, even while executive payroll remains unchanged in the financial record.
Practice: Labor Cost Optimization
Observed executive time allocation shows where senior attention is spent, but not why each meeting occurred. Routine decisions can move from unclear ownership into local delay, preparation, approval, and a return to operations before the underlying issue is fully resolved.
When the same issue escalates again, rework and repeated preparation extend the operating cycle while other senior work moves out of period. Decision rights, issue age, calendars, meeting records, returned decisions, and rework locate that displacement.
CEO time allocation
72%
Time in meetings
The observed CEOs spent this share of recorded work time in meetings.
37
Meetings each week
The tracked CEOs averaged 37 meetings during a reported work week.
Calendars and delayed priorities locate senior work moved out of period. That displacement can sit alongside the workforce commitments created by strategy without appearing as a separate executive payroll line.
The sample is small and limited to large-company CEOs. The study describes time allocation and does not establish that meetings were unnecessary or caused by routine escalation.
Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria, How CEOs Manage Time, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2018. The study tracked 27 CEOs of large companies continuously for 13 weeks and assembled approximately 60,000 hours of coded time-use data.
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These four records locate recurring escalation and displaced senior attention. They do not establish that a meeting, approval, or escalation event was unnecessary.
City Shift Finance analytical record set informed by the Porter and Nohria source above. No executive time is priced and no company result is simulated.
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