Time to Think

“Or how a writer’s notebook, a box of

grade-school supplies and thirty minutes
a day allow me to reclaim a lost skill and
a lost art”
‐ Kevin Toth

Kevin Toth is senior vice president and chief underwriting

officer for Harleysville Insurance. Kevin is also a student in
the 130th session of the Columbia Business School Senior
Executive Program (CSEP). Special thanks to Bruce Craven
for his insightful comments, his generous use of the editing
pen, and his encouragement to write this piece. An extra‐
special thanks to Nila Wagner for her work on the layout,
graphics, and aesthetics, and for teaching me the differ‐
ence between serif and sans serif fonts.
 Business gurus annoy me.

Not because they’re wrong.

But because they’re mostly right.

My gut tells me just what the gurus tell me: “Ask better questions to get better answers.”
Okay, I get that part. What I don’t get is how I’m supposed to do this when I don’t have time
to think … or even slow down enough to remind myself to think! How can I be a thought
leader in a life cluttered with obligations, demands and distractions? How can I find time to
think? Just thinking about thinking starts to sound like another task to me, one more box to
check off on my ever‐growing to‐do list. And the priority, the necessity, and the importance
of thinking slip away as I check off the other boxes and the day disappears like every other
day before it.

Is thinking a lost skill? Is thinking a lost art?

There used to be nothing like a flight from Philadelphia to Los Angeles to allow me time to
reflect. Five hours all to myself. Time for my mind to relax and to make connections and to
collect ideas. Time to identify solutions to problems that mattered, but kept being ignored.
And time to write down these ideas, the results of my thinking, so I could remember them
later and do something useful with them.

Writing is cathartic. It unclutters my brain and lets me nail down my thoughts and give them
each a name and consider them with rigor to see if they are necessary and add value to my
work and to my life.

Writing clarifies. It exposes sloppy thinking and forces me to deal with what is being ignored.
Writing offers me engagement with the richness and subtlety of ideas. Writing allows me to
really think.

Not that writing and thinking are ever easy. I love the way Hemingway put it: “There is
nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” But, to me, writing and
thinking together are essential. The key is finding the time –and creating the environment—
to allow myself to think and write together.

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I have been searching for a way to recreate the creative conditions of the days when air‐travel
had the built‐in excuse of removing me from being connected with day‐to‐day obligations.
Before Wi‐Fi and 3G stormed the airlines like an obnoxious passenger, air travel used to mean
you were far away, up in the air, and out of reach from others. In our present world, except
for extreme situations, we are always in reach, always available, and always expected to
respond instantly.

So, short of spending my life at thirty thousand feet in the air, how can I disconnect from the
hustle and noise and really think? Columbia Business School offered me a powerful solution:
Reflection time.

The idea is to carve out time each day to think and question and wrestle with
ideas and pull them together. Time to understand what insights and ideas the day
has offered me and to collect these ideas and make them available for when I
need them, when I must apply them to solve problems and add value.

Reflection time doesn’t have to require a lot of time. But it has to be my time. Thirty minutes
will do. The power is in the repetition.

Enter the supplies: A small writer’s notebook and a box stuffed with scissors and stickers and
markers and gold stars and even the Crayola 8‐pack.

At first it feels … weird. When was the last time I gripped a brick‐red crayon?

I indulge the weirdness. I am a visual learner and so I cut and paste a few lecture slides I want
to remember. From there I decide to try drawing the concepts to see if they stick.

Something is happening. A
creative and artistic side I never
knew is emerging. Ideas have
names and faces. Concepts are
taking shape.

As I draw the steeple, I sense

that, whenever I come to that
page, I will have to ask if our
employees see themselves as
ditch‐diggers or cathedral‐
builders. And I will have to take
some ownership for the answer.
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I turn to the George Carlin quote. It reminds me
of the importance of perspective. I chuckle at my
crude artistic rendering, but the crudeness of the
drawing forces me to remember that there are
drivers and pedestrians in every company. Am
I a pedestrian who sees the sales staff as a bunch
of price‐cutting maniacs? Can I still be sure they
see me as the helpful home office guy I see
in the mirror?

With each filled page, I see connections. I see

that this idea over here has something to say to this other idea over here. How can I introduce
them to one another? If I can get them on the same page in my notebook, maybe I can get
them on the same page in my brain. Then maybe I can do something with them.

Speaking of things I need to do, I need to listen better. I have known that for years. What I
haven’t spent enough time thinking about is why I don’t listen well and what that means for
my ability to lead.

Through my reflections, I have come to see my need to be a better listener as a symptom of

a deeper issue – and opportunity: Relying too much on my ideas and not enough on the
creativity of others who have something important to say and value to add.

Here is how I figured this out:

Innovation is rarely the product of a brand new

idea. This was –and is— a new concept for me.
The genius is in bringing together new combinations
of existing elements.

But why can some leaders see these combinations

while others can not? Innovators, I am learning,
can better access the “shelves of their brains” – all
of what they have learned and lived.

They stock their shelves by being curious and

asking questions and not dismissing ideas out of
hand. They seem obsessed with knowing whether
anyone, anywhere, has solved any part of the
problem they face.

And they listen to the answers. 3

This is good stuff, I thought. But it pointed
only to my need to listen better. It did not tell
me why I don’t listen well in the first place or
how my thinking needs to change. What is it,
I asked, that frees these organizations to listen
and explore and test and create so well?

Page by page, my notebook of reflections

showed me. Because the people who lead
these organizations are curious and love
to learn, they create environments where
learning and creativity are prized. They look
beyond their own ideas and bring together
and unleash the creative powers of diverse
groups. They see the power of people with
lots of different stuff on the shelves of their
brains. They create conditions where others
can safely explore that stuff and create some‐
thing new from it.

Great leaders share a passion for “the

other”: Other people and other ideas and
even other industries that can teach them
something. They put others in the center.

I realized that, when I listen well, I put others in

the center. When I can’t wait to share my idea
or improve someone else’s, I put myself
in the center.

This need to put others in the center surfaced

again and again in my reflections. But nowhere
did it emerge more clearly than in a session
on leadership lessons from a symphony
conductor. As I sit among an ensemble and
watch and listen and learn, this idea of putting
others in the center comes alive.

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I laugh as the conductor acts out ways of
conducting that frustrate and confuse and
irritate the group. It is a laugh that says
“guilty as charged.” I think of my own
leadership style and how I act as if the
baton of the C‐suite creates the music in
my department. “What would our symphony
say?” I wonder.

The business gurus have nothing on the

maestro, I think. His words are simple but
packed with meaning and relevance: “The
power is not in the baton; it’s in the music”
he says with a smile. I smile back as I realize
no baton ever made music worth listening to.

I watch the conductor’s vain effort to raise

the energy level of the group by waving the
baton furiously. This absurd display leads me
to consider the many times I act as if my
personal energy level will create energy for
the group.

Like the maestro, the leader’s job is to create

“ The power is not in the baton; it’s
in the music”
conditions where the energy and electricity
of a group can be unleashed. That is a big
change in not just my thinking, but my understanding of what leadership is. When you think
you earn promotions by the quality of your ideas and your accomplishments, the idea of
creating conditions where others can create feels as weird as the red crayon did on my first
day of reflection time.

“It’s not enough to love the music,” the maestro explains. “You have to love the way the
orchestra plays it.”

The maestro’s words are not lost on me. I love the music. But I’ve been smitten by how I think
I play it and not nearly enough in love with how the orchestra plays it.

* * *

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I’m back from CSEP part 1, two weeks of executive education under my belt. I am back to
the obligations and the clutter and the distractions and the demands … the constant drone of
tasks that are continuously important and can’t be ignored.

However, something is different. I’m listening more and talking less. My use of the baton is
sparer and my gestures more measured.

I’m asking more questions. I’m not scribbling pages of notes during meetings to master the
content. I am sifting through the content for something else: What is this conversation really
about?

Is this meeting about a new workflow for underwriting? Or it is about an executive who
believes the organization is not committed to winning in this product line? Which question
will produce a better answer? And who among the symphony can offer better answers and
better questions?

Reflecting is making me more reflective.

Being more reflective is making me more effective.

So I’ve decided to continue reflecting at the end of each day. I shut the door and turn off the
computer and open my notebook. And think.

Today, I imagine the flow of energy in my organization if we all spent the last half‐hour of
each day reflecting. What if we started our staff meetings by going around the room and
talking about what we’re wrestling with in our notebooks?

I finally found time to think. Now that I did, I’ve realized I really need to know, more than ever,
what they think.