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Innovating for the Future 155

details and miss longer-horizon threats and opportunities. But if you veer
toward too many blue-sky ideas and make major investments in them, you
will miss next quarter’s numbers or neglect key customers, threatening the
success and longevity of your unit, as well as your own career. Achieving
this balance is in part a logistical matter of making time for you to focus on
innovation and, in part, a conceptual question of how to balance current
and future work throughout the organization.

Creating bandwidth to focus on the future
Freeing up your time from being totally absorbed in day-to-day activi- ties
is a critical part of getting ready for the future. A leader can easily be so
focused on current challenges and problems that there is no time to think
about the next quarter, much less the next decade—think of Stephen
Covey’s dictum that the urgent drives out the important. This is one of the
most pernicious traps that leaders fall into and that reduces their ability to
create a sustaining enterprise, because if you focus on the future too late,
it’s already here and you’re behind the curve. So while all of the steps that
we described in the “getting results” practice in chapter 4 are critical, doing
them at the expense of time to deal with the future is counterproductive.
Consider, for example, Jim Smith’s move to reshape Thomson Reu-
ters’s operating rhythm to free up more of his own time for thinking, plan-
ning, and connecting with customers. This kind of shift is necessary in
companies of all sizes. Yaron Galai, the founder and CEO of digital media
startup Outbrain, did the same thing when his company reached a signifi-
cant threshold of growth, and he realized that he no longer had enough
time to focus on both managing the current business and figuring out the
next chapter. As a result, he brought in an experienced operational leader
who had been on the board to serve as a co-CEO, which allowed him to
focus on the future of the company.
Finding bandwidth is often about personal discipline as much as or-
ganizational cadence. That kind of discipline is necessary for good leaders
at every level: for example, Jane Kirkland, senior vice president of State
Street Corporation, is relentless about organizing her time to make sure
she doesn’t get buried in day-to-day activities: “I work off of a regular list of