Seven in ten business leaders say their primary competitive strategy over the next three years is to be fast and nimble. Not to cut costs. Not to scale. To move faster than the market shifts around them. That finding, from Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report, reflects a shift that reaches well beyond startups and venture capital. Speed of execution has become the baseline expectation for every organization, and the leaders who cannot keep pace are already falling behind.
AI is accelerating this pressure. Tools that once took weeks to build now take hours. An analysis that required a team now requires a prompt. But AI does not execute decisions. It does not coordinate across departments, clear bottlenecks, or follow through on the work that turns a fast decision into a fast outcome. That layer still requires a person, and for most executives, the right executive assistant is the difference between deciding fast and actually moving fast.
Why Fast Decisions Still Stall
Jeff Bezos made the case for speed in his 2016 letter to shareholders: “Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.” He drew a distinction between irreversible decisions (which deserve careful deliberation) and reversible ones (which should move fast). Most organizational slowness, he argued, comes from treating reversible decisions as if they were permanent.
That was 2016. A decade later, the 70% threshold feels generous. AI gives leaders access to better information faster, which means the bottleneck has moved downstream. The constraint is no longer “do we have enough data to decide?” It is “can we execute before the window closes?” And execution depends on the support infrastructure around the leader.
The 41% Problem
If speed depends on execution, then anything that slows an executive’s ability to act is a direct competitive liability.
Research by Julian Birkinshaw and Jordan Cohen, published in Harvard Business Review, found that knowledge workers spend an average of 41% of their time on tasks that could be handled by someone else. For executives, the proportion is often higher: scheduling, travel logistics, status updates, vendor coordination, and the steady accumulation of administrative work that displaces strategic thinking.
Birkinshaw and Cohen estimated that structured delegation could recover up to 10 hours per week. Ten hours is not a marginal improvement. It is the difference between an executive who spends Monday through Wednesday on decisions and follow-through and one who is still clearing last week’s inbox.
The question is not whether to delegate. It is whether you have someone capable of handling what you delegate.
What the CEO Time Study Tells Us
The most comprehensive study of executive time management comes from Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria, who tracked 27 CEOs over nearly 60,000 hours for Harvard Business Review. Their findings:
- CEOs work an average of 62.5 hours per week
- 75% of their time is scheduled in advance
- 61% of their time is spent in face-to-face meetings
The study found that a highly skilled executive assistant “can dramatically increase their efficiency and effectiveness.” EAs who understood the leader’s priorities could filter communications, protect unstructured thinking time, and ensure the schedule reflected strategic goals rather than whoever asked first.
Porter and Nohria were studying CEO effectiveness, not speed. But the implications for speed are direct. If 75% of an executive’s time is pre-scheduled, the quality of that schedule determines how fast they can act. A well-managed calendar creates space for decisions. A poorly managed one fills every gap with meetings that could have been emails.
The person who controls the schedule controls the speed.
Speed Requires the Right EA, Not Just Any EA
Not every executive assistant is equipped for this role. The kind of EA who converts executive speed into organizational speed brings a specific set of capabilities:
- Judgment about priorities. They know which requests deserve the executive’s time and which can be handled, deferred, or declined without escalation.
- Anticipation. They prepare briefing materials before they are asked, flag a scheduling conflict with a board member before it derails a product launch, and keep follow-up items from falling through.
- Working across departments. They move information between teams without requiring the executive to serve as the relay point.
- Comfort with ambiguity. In a fast-moving environment, they make reasonable calls on incomplete information rather than queuing every decision for approval.
This is not a job description you fill out through a general job board. The difference between an EA who adds speed and one who adds friction is the difference between someone trained for strategic support and someone trained for task execution. If you are hiring an executive assistant for a startup or a growing company, this distinction matters even more: smaller teams have less margin for slow execution.
The Cost of Getting It Wrong
When an executive lacks effective support, the cost shows up in two ways. The obvious cost is time. Birkinshaw and Cohen’s research puts a number on it: up to 10 hours per week spent on work someone else could handle. Over a year, that is more than 500 hours of executive capacity lost to tasks that never required their judgment.
The less obvious cost is decision delay. Every hour an executive spends on logistics is an hour a decision sits unexecuted. In a market where seven in ten leaders are prioritizing speed, that delay compounds quickly. Decisions that could close in a day stretch to a week. The follow-up that should happen on Tuesday waits until the executive digs out on Friday.
The reverse is also true. An executive with the right EA moves faster on every front: faster follow-through on decisions, faster preparation for meetings, faster response to emerging opportunities. The EA does not make the decisions. They clear the path so decisions turn into outcomes.
Find an EA Built for Speed
The speed advantage is not about working harder or longer. It is about removing the friction between a decision and its execution. The right executive assistant does exactly that.
If your organization is competing on speed and your leadership team lacks the support to move at that pace, C-Suite Assistants specializes in placing executive assistants who bring strategic judgment, the ability to work across departments, and the drive to operate at the tempo your business demands. Contact our team to start your search.
Sources
- Deloitte, “2026 Global Human Capital Trends” (2026). Claim: 7 in 10 business leaders say speed and nimbleness is their primary competitive strategy; “speed now outpaces scale.”
- Jeff Bezos, “2016 Letter to Shareholders” (2016). Claim: most decisions should be made with ~70% of desired information; distinguishes reversible vs. irreversible decisions.
- Julian Birkinshaw and Jordan Cohen, “Make Time for the Work That Matters,” Harvard Business Review (2013). Claim: knowledge workers spend 41% of their time on delegatable tasks; structured delegation can recover up to 10 hours per week.
- Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria, “How CEOs Manage Time,” Harvard Business Review (2018). Claim: CEOs work 62.5 hours/week, 75% pre-scheduled; a highly skilled EA “can dramatically increase efficiency and effectiveness.”
