If you're ever favored enough to catch a few minutes of a corporate CEO's time, and feel bold enough to ask what their job entails, chances are you'll hear something lofty about developing strategy, empowering employees, seeing the big picture. But if you ask to see their calendar for the past month, you'll probably find they've spent very little, if any, time doing those things. The look-at-last-month's-calendar trick was devised by Donald Laurie, a Boston-based management consultant, to help top executives figure out how best to lead their companies. Laurie sees a leader as the person who climbs out on the balcony and sees the company from above, the one who sees how all the parts connect to make a smoothly running machine. At the same time, if the leader stays up on that balcony for too much of the day, he or she can't hear the grumbling below. And what's being grumbled about is often the information that could save the CEO's job. As an example of this, Laurie relates the story of Xerox Corp. when it

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