Secrets of greatness: How I work 2/2 (RD)

Marissa MayerVP, Search Products and User Experience, GoogleExecutive summary: Don't just cope with information -- revel in it.
"e-mail application called Pine, a Linux-based utility I started using in college. It's a very simple text-based mailer in a crunchy little terminal window with Courier fonts."
"To keep track of tasks, I have a little document called a task list. And in the same document there's a list for each person I work with or interact with, of what they're working on or what I expect from them. It's just a list in a text file. Using this, I can plan my day out the night before."

Bill Gross
Chief Investment Officer, Pimco
Executive summary: Cut through the noise.

Vera Wang
CEO, Vera Wang Group
Executive summary: Get away from the routine.

Howard Schultz
Chairman, Starbucks
Executive summary: Rise early -- and have the occasional jolt of joe.

Wynton Marsalis
Artistic Director, Jazz at Lincoln Center
Executive summary: Challenge each other -- but don't hold grudges.

Carlos Ghosn
CEO of Renault (France) and Nissan (Japan)
Executive summary: Focus relentlessly, especially if you're running two Global 500 companies.

Amy W. Schulman
Partner, DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary
Executive summary: Be compulsively organized -- and delegate.
"I get around 600 e-mails a day. I divide them into four categories, and I deal with them immediately, by and large. First are e-mails that I forward to someone else. Next are where somebody's giving me information that I need to cascade to somebody else with instructions. Third are the ones that I can read later on an airplane. Fourth are those that require me to respond immediately."

A.G. Lafley
Chairman, President, and CEO, Procter & Gamble
Executive summary: Take a break, even if you work Sunday nights.

Bill Gates,
Chairman and chief software architect, Microsoft,
"The screen on the left has my list of e-mails. On the center screen is usually the specific e-mail I'm reading and responding to. And my browser is on the right-hand screen. This setup gives me the ability to glance and see what new has come in while I'm working on something, and to bring up a link that's related to an e-mail and look at it while the e-mail is still in front of me."

"Another digital tool that has had a big effect on my productivity is desktop search. It has transformed the way I access information on my PC, on servers, and on the Internet. With larger hard drives and increasing bandwidth, I now have gigabytes of information on my PC and servers in the form of e-mails, documents, media files, contact databases, and so on.

Instead of having to navigate through folders to find that one document where I think a piece of information might be, I simply type search terms into a toolbar and all the e-mails and documents that contain that information are at my fingertips. The same goes for phone numbers and email addresses."

"Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It's fully synchronized with my office machine so I have all the files I need. It also has a note-taking piece of software called OneNote, so all my notes are in digital form."

Secrets of greatness: How I work 1/2 (CNN)

From CCN- Money channel,
http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/02/news/newsmakers/howiwork_fortune_032006/index.htm
E-mail and voicemail; yoga and personal assistants; structure and grooving: A dozen accomplished people tell what works for them.

By Cait Murphy, FORTUNE assistant managing editor
March 16, 2006: 3:17 PM EST

NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - Information everywhere. Connectivity at all hours. A smaller world.

Many of the things that make living in the 21st century so interesting can also be a nightmare for those who have to work in it. With a new store opening up every five hours, Starbucks (Research) Chairman Howard Schultz more or less lives on the phone to attempt to keep track of things.


And pity poor Carlos Ghosn, who was such a brilliant success with Nissan in Japan, turning the once-tarnished brand around, that he has added two more jobs to his resume -- and on two different continents, no less.

"My normal routine is pretty much putting out fires all day."
-- Vera Wang, designer

But the following 12 interviews are by no means a litany of complaints. These people, ranging from jazz maestro Wynton Marsalis to jurist Richard Posner to Goldman's CEO, Hank Paulson, love what they do.

The challenge is to continue to do it well, when the responsibilities and complexities keep increasing. One common answer is to get up early -- real early. Note to MBA students: If you can't rise at dawn, you might just reconsider your goal of making it as a CEO.

Another answer is the creative use of technology -- bond fund manager Bill Gross would be short-circuited without Bloomberg screens and one suspects that separating Google's (Research) Marissa Mayer from her laptop would be difficult. That said, it is interesting how many of the subjects say they don't use e-mail (but then others spend up to 14 hours at a time on it).

"I'll just sit down and do e-mail for ten to 14 hours straight."
-- Marissa Mayer, Google

If there is a common denominator here, it is that for all the whizz-bang gadgetry that makes it possible to nag people in a dozen time zones in a single day, the human touch still matters. A.G. Lafley stocks his office with funny furniture to make it approachable and wanders about regularly. Amy Schulman turns off her cell phone to give her full attention to her clients.

Technology can help people perform, after all, but it is people who inspire technology -- and each other.

"A key to staying calm is minimizing the information onslaught."
-- A.G. Lafley, chairman, president and CEO of Procter & Gamble