In a remarkable 2006 feature that I have gone back to again and again over the years, the then-CEO of Proctor and Gamble talked about How I Work. I have quoted nearly the entirety of what he says:
I’ve learned how to manage my energy. I used to just focus on managing my time. I’d be up in the morning between 5 and 5:30. I’d work out and be at my desk by 6:30 or 7, drive hard until about 7 P.M., then go home, take a break with my wife, Margaret, and be back at it later that evening. I was just grinding through the day.
During my first year in this job, I worked every Saturday and every Sunday morning. Now I work really hard for an hour or an hour and a half. Then I take a break. I walk around and chit-chat with people. It can take five or 15 minutes to recharge. It’s kind of like the interval training that an athlete does.
I learned this in a program called the Corporate Athlete that we put on for P&G managers. I did the two-day program, where I also learned to change the way I eat. I used to eat virtually nothing for breakfast. Now I have a V-8 juice, half a bagel, and a cup of yogurt. And I eat five or six times a day. It’s about managing your glycemic level. You don’t want to boom and bust.
The other piece of the Corporate Athlete program is spiritual — things you can do to calm the mind. I’ve tried to teach myself to meditate. When I travel, which is 60 percent of the time, I find that meditating for five, ten, or 15 minutes in a hotel room at night can be as good as a workout. Generally, I think I know myself so much better than I used to. And that has helped me stay calm and cool under fire.
A key to staying calm is minimizing the information onslaught. I can’t remember the last time I wrote a memo. I write little handwritten notes on my AGL paper, and I send notes, a paragraph or less, on my BlackBerry. I prefer conversations. That’s one reason my office and our entire executive floor is open. The CEO office is not typically a warm and welcoming place, but people feel they can come in and talk in mine. We have goofy-looking pink and chartreuse chairs with chrome frames and upholstered backs and seats.
The full series is here. It features Marissa Mayer, then at Google, Carlos Ghosn, then yet to have his reputation ruined, Bill Gross, then yet to be forced out of Pimco, John McCain, then yet far away from running for President and Hank Paulson, then at Goldman Sachs, shortly before becoming Secretary of the Treasury and subsequently having to deal with the financial crisis.
Bonus: the next month, Fortune published a more detailed How I Work with Bill Gates, then no longer Microsoft’s CEO but still its chairman. We will almost certainly examine it in more detail in a future post some time.