THE MANAGEMENT OF TIME by James Tackaberry McCay was a book ahead of its time. It was first published in 1959 (ISBN 978-0135488911), and republished in 1995 (ISBN 0-13-182254-3). In 1959, the Russians photographed the far side of the moon for the first time. Computers ran on punch cards. Cadillacs had tail fins. Jim McCay was 38 years old.
And yet, if this book had been written in the 1990s, it would have been recognized immediately as a brilliant synthesis of the ideas that Tom Peters, Stephen Covey, Alvin Toffler, Edwards Deming, and Deepak Chopra were each advancing separately.
The Management of Time by James Tackaberry McCay with a new Introduction and Appreciation by Richard Edward Ward.
McCay had already seen the whole picture — the leadership, the empowerment, the systems thinking, the inner life of organizations — and woven it into a single, readable, practical work.
That the book arrived thirty years early is both the tragedy, and the miracle of it.
Meeting James McCay
I was in my twenties when I first encountered James Tackaberry McCay. I should write met as I was introduced to him by a mutual friend who thought I could be of assistance to Jim. It then turned out that Jim was a business associate and dear friend of an old classmate of my father from McGill, Bill Dawson.
Jim was already a legend in certain circles — the kind of man who held executive meetings in swimming pools so that everyone was the same height. The kind of man who could walk into a boardroom, say something completely unexpected, and leave the room thinking differently for the next decade.
Consultant to Major Canadian Companies
McCay worked with the leaders of major Canadian companies such as: Alcan, Canadian National Railways, Canadian Pacific, and Crown Life.
Changing How I Saw the World
Working alongside Jim changed how I understood people, organizations, and time itself. Writing the introduction to this book was one of the privileges of my life. What follows is my appreciation of the man and his work — offered here as an invitation to anyone discovering The Management of Time for the first time.
What This Book Is Really About
At its core, The Management of Time is about energy — how we generate it, direct it, waste it, and recover it. McCay shows you how to see yourself and the people around you as participants in an ongoing exchange of energy. Once you can see that, you can begin to amplify what works and quietly eliminate what doesn’t.
The book moves from the personal outward: from how your own mind and body function, to how you communicate, to how teams and organizations either thrive or quietly suffocate themselves. McCay’s insight was that these are not separate problems. They are one problem, seen at different scales.
He also understood motivation in a way that most management writers of his era completely missed.
Motivation, for McCay, was inseparable from value — and value was inseparable from genuine participation. You cannot motivate someone who has been excluded from the meaning of the work. His methods were designed to bring out the best in people with less supervision, by making everyone’s involvement count.
The Man Behind the Ideas
Jim McCay was a chemical engineer by training who had spent extended time in Japan studying Zen. He had consulted to some of the most influential organizations of his era and interviewed many of its most consequential leaders. He was, in the best sense, a maverick.
In preparing to write the new Introduction and Appreciation to the 1995 edition of The Management of Time we interviewed a number of business leaders who McCay had worked with. Three stories have stayed with me as the clearest windows into who he was.
David Culver
David Culver, who was CEO of Alcan, told me that even when he didn’t always agree with McCay’s methods, he never stopped using McCay’s framework for assembling a leadership team. McCay identified four essential personality types that every healthy organization needs:
- Hunters — the innovators, the ones who go out and bring something back
- Spiritualists — the keepers of values, the conscience of the organization
- Jesters — the ones who release tension at exactly the right moment
- Leaders — the people wise enough to know they need all three of the above
Bill Dawson
Bill Dawson, Chairman of Descon and one of McCay’s closest associates, described experiments that would feel at home in a mindfulness retreat today: teams lying on the floor of a darkened room with music playing, trying to find their center. McCay also tested, repeatedly and with measurable results, the hypothesis that directing genuine positive attention toward another person increases their positive response. He called it an experiment. Most of us would call it kindness with intention.
Bob Bandeen
Bob Bandeen — who led Canadian National Railways and Crown Life — put it simply: *Jim McCay made you see things differently.* For those who were ready, he was a guide. For those who weren’t, he was an eccentric. He wore both descriptions without apology.
Why It Still Matters
The Management of Time is deceptively easy to read. You can open it anywhere, find a section that speaks to your current situation, and it will stand on its own.
But it is also a workbook — and the practices McCay recommends are far easier to read about than to actually do. They require something most productivity systems carefully avoid asking for: a genuine commitment to your own growth.
McCay was already sensing, in the final pages of this book, that the horizon was expanding. He was moving from individual development to organizational culture, from teams to whole economies, from management to civilization. He was asking what happens when rapid change, global communication, and a hunger for meaning collide — and what kind of leader that moment requires.
He had a vision for something he called the Integron Centre — a place where management, mysticism, and futurism would meet, where leaders from business, government, and academia would think together at the edge of what was known. Buckminster Fuller designed the Integron Centre as a geodesic dome. There a disco ball dropping from the ceiling that was to hold the computer system. Far out stuff indeed.
It never materialized in his lifetime. But the questions he was asking are the questions we are still living with.
In the pages of The Management of Time
be prepared to be challenged and stretched.
That was always Jim’s invitation.
Beyond Motivation – The Book
Beyond Motivation is based on The Manangement of Time.
I hope that you are enjoying exploring the works of James Tackaberry McCay.
Richard Edward Ward
– former executive assistant to James Tackaberry McCay
– co-author of the new Introduction and Appreciation of the 1995 edition of The Management of Time
– author and publisher of the 2015 Expanded eBook editions of Beyond Motivation
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