I once heard Richard Nixon, when he was President, say in an interview how important it was for the President to have time to sit and think. He said one of the biggest lessons he had to learn in his early days as President was to delegate so that he could literally have an hour a day just to sit quietly and think. This was almost 50 years ago—well before the age of 24-hour news cycles and business operating on the same 24-hour schedule with worldwide operations, meetings, e-mail, text messages, and all the other forms of 2017 style communications.
While perhaps not yet with the comprehensive authority of a U.S. president, the current day chief compliance officer is usually quite taken with putting out the daily fires of a multinational compliance program where a company has operations literally across the globe. The same holds true for any C-Suite executive of such an organization. I thought about Nixon’s long ago interview when I read about a recent book Lead Yourself First and a recent review about the book.
