The Rules of Management, 4th Edition

RULE 44

Value your time

I once sat in a meeting, as a very junior manager, in which there was an interminable discussion going on about whether or not we should buy a particular piece of equipment that some people thought too pricey. I’d said what I had to say on the subject (as indeed had everyone, but some of them were saying it several times) so to pass the time I did a quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation of the combined hourly rate of everyone sitting round the table. I pretty much knew everyone’s salaries, so it would have been a fairly close estimate. The interesting thing was that the half hour we spent talking about this piece of equipment was nearly twice as costly as the thing itself.

As a Rules manager, you need to know what your ...