3Time‐Driven Sucks … Impact‐Driven Matters

I well remember meeting Ron for the first time at a seminar I was presenting to the Californian State CPA Society in San Francisco in 1996. As Ron mentioned earlier, it was April 30 that year (and yes, we still celebrate that anniversary).

Ron was sitting in the middle of the room on an aisle right of center.

And at one point, it was almost as if he was cheering me on in a room of otherwise furrowed brows as I got very passionate about what I saw then (and still do) as the indefensible practice of keeping timesheets and charging things based on time.

When the session ended, Ron enthusiastically introduced himself (thank goodness). “My mission,” he said, “is to bury the billable hour. I want it inscribed on my tombstone that that is precisely what I achieved in my life.”

Now, just 26 years later, Ron can consider it largely done.

He's championed that cause so well. And it's done. He of course claims it's not just him … but it is. No one has so eloquently buried the billable hour as Ron.

All of us who have played a small part in it acknowledge that. Ron really is a giant. As Sir Isaac Newton put it in 1675: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Thank goodness Ron has broad shoulders, too.

And we all acknowledge that being time‐driven sucks. In a March 2022 piece reporting on Gravity, CEO Dan Price, put it very simply like this:

Give employees what they need to do a job well; then, focus on outcomes, ...

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