This portfolio lies open on a conference table during a midafternoon meeting with a prospective client, Software City, at its Englewood, N.J., headquarters. Twice during the meeting Settle's pager vibrates silently at her waist. She surreptitiously unhooks it and quickly scans the messages below the level of the conference-room table. Asked about this after the meeting, Software City's president and its director of franchisee relations both report they were unoffended by the interruptions. They termed Settle's pager checks "discreet and brief." Nonetheless it seems clear that pager etiquette, like pager technology, remains a work in progress.
Paper Weighting
Like Settle, Joe Phelps recognizes the need to have a strong connection with the business. Nevertheless, he is adamant about maintaining a degree of separation between himself and his company's daily operations. "I'm trying to work more on the business and less in the business," he says.
Phelps is CEO of the Phelps Group, a $25-million-a-year marketing communications agency in West Los Angeles, Calif. His 48-employee firm, which he founded in 1981, has grown at the enviable rate of 26% per year for the past nine years, serving such clients as the tourist boards of Tahiti and Switzerland, Hughes Communications, and Fender Musical Instruments Corp. Phelps attributes some of that success to his own ability to assume rigorous control of his daily schedule, to prioritize his tasks, and to devote more time to planning.
Though his agency has had a long, cutting-edge association with technology (all PCs were networked as early as 1987, and the company has been been waiting two years for clients to catch up to its videoconferencing capabilities), Phelps does not rely on an electronic PDA and on-screen schedules to manage his time. Instead, he sketches out each day in black and white in the pages of a personal planner called the Priority Manager, from Priority Management Systems Inc., which he believes in almost religiously. Not only does Phelps use it, but so does nearly everyone else in the company.
"It's a pretty big investment--about $495 per employee--but I think the payoff happens pretty quickly," says Phelps. The cost includes several training sessions, including one in which a trainer walks through a workday with the employee to help establish better time-budgeting behavior. The system itself melds a calendar of events (meetings, appointments, project deadlines), a daily scheduler, an A-to-Z directory with phone numbers, a communications planner, and a special scheduler for "balance elements" (soccer games, pottery class, Seinfeld). "It's become a part of the company culture," says Phelps. "You don't attend a meeting without your planner." Metaphorically and in practice, everyone's on the same page.
"I let paper do what it does best and technology do what it does best," Phelps says. "The [PDAs] take too long to boot up. If I want a phone number, it's a lot faster for me to flip to the back of my planner." There he keeps a tidy address book printed out from GoldMine, his electronic contact manager.
If the low-tech Priority Manager is Phelps's key personal productivity tool, then regularly scheduled "personal work time" (PWT) is his most important entry. Noting that "too many executives see white and fill it," Phelps unfailingly blocks out six hours a week of PWT--which he generally devotes to "getting the processes right" and big-picture planning. Typically, Phelps's PWT follows an early morning workout at a local health club. After an hour or so of climbing the Stairmaster, Phelps is back in his satellite home office by 8 a.m., working on those 50,000-foot questions like: How can we better live up to our mission statement?
At home, Phelps enjoys the best of both worlds. He has uninterrupted quiet, but also--should he need it--an instant connection to the office. Via modem, he can access his desktop computer at work and check E-mail. He can also access the company's intranet pages, a good way to monitor the status of all client projects.
"As president of the company, I'm copied on a lot of E-mail. My tendency is to reply, but our head of operations suggested I not comment so often," says Phelps, alluding to the importance of giving employees room to grow. He still monitors the flow of messages, however, and admits: "I sometimes have to force myself to keep my hands off the keyboard."
Because some messages just can't be delivered in writing, Phelps has arranged for extensive voice connectivity between his home office and the company. Thanks to an off-premises extension (OPX) line that his phone company provides, he has the equivalent of a hot line to work. Three numbers patch him to anybody's workstation; a special voice-mail feature enables him to punch in a code--say, THT--and leave a batch message for the entire Tahiti team. And, without playing phone tag, Phelps can arrange a meeting for later in the day by checking employee schedules posted on the bulletin board of the company's cc: Mail system.
Refreshed from his workout and PWT, Phelps arrives at the central office between 9 and 10 a.m., ready to join the fray. From its founding, the Phelps Group has thrived on an open-office floor plan, which Phelps finds communally energizing and a good cross-pollinator of ideas. He sits near the apex of the horseshoe of workstations, right in the thick of things, which makes his PWT at home all the more essential.
With technology revolutionizing office communications, Phelps stresses the need to tap the right tool for the right task. "There are three ways to communicate now within our organization: E-mail, voice mail, and face mail," he explains. "Each one has a different bandwidth. When you walk into my workstation, interrupt me, and give me a little schedule change, you've used the wrong medium. E-mail me with that. You don't need a lot of bandwidth. On the other hand, if you try to handle an emotionally charged subject with E-mail, you're using the wrong medium, too."
But that's not to say that just because a matter is small, it is necessarily fodder for E-mail. Phelps recently explained this to his staff, using a case of purloined pizza to illustrate the point.
The Phelps Group is small enough that anyone can push a button and send an E-mail to everyone. One employee recently did just that, asking, "Who took my slice of pizza?" from the group refrigerator. Armed with a perfect teaching tool, Phelps ran through a bit of math at a companywide meeting. Assume--for mathematical simplicity--a billing rate of $60 an hour, or a buck a minute. Roughly 50 employees. Say it took each a half minute to open the "pizza message," read it, and put it in the trash. Twenty-five minutes at a dollar a minute--$25 to try to finger the pizza thief. Says Phelps: "Since we all share 40 percent of the profits, everyone quickly grasped what general E-mail distribution means."
