Archive for the ‘balance’ Category

A few companies are not counting the hours you take off

Friday, August 31st, 2007

Companies’ continuing obsession with measuring their employees’ input, rather than their output, is one of my pet peeves. “If you’re not at your desk, you’re not working,” and its corollary, “If you are at your desk or at a meeting, you are working,” are among the most persistent myths in white-collar corporate America. These myths ignore two facts:

  1. Some people who aren’t at their desks are, in fact working.
  2. Some people who are at their desks are not, in fact, doing anything productive.

A related issue is accounting for vacation time. In today’s Times, reporter Ken Belson writes about IBM’s policy of leaving it to employees’ and their supervisors’ discretion as to when they take vacation time. Peer pressure certainly puts bounds on how much time can be taken, and IBM’s intense work culture, according to Belson, leads to workers taking less time than they are allowed. Nonetheless, any move to allow workers and direct managers control over how and when time is spent at work is a major step forward in my mind.

Here’s my favorite quote from the article:

“When you have a work force of fully formed professionals who have been working for much of their life,” Patty McCord, the chief talent officer of Netflix [which also leaves vacation time to employees' discretion], said, “you have a connection between the work you do and how long it takes to do it, so you don’t need to have the clock-in and clock-out mentality.”

(Photo by smartnetny via stock.xchng)

Posted in New York Times, balance, management, productivity, work ethic, workaholism | Comments

The $70MM per year hedge fund trader, my hero (not)

Thursday, August 30th, 2007

I’ve been trying to digest the Wall Street Journal’s front page story (link – $$) earlier this month on Mike McGoldrick, the Goldman Sachs trader who left because at $70MM per year he felt underpaid. That’s puzzling enough, but here are two passages that blew my mind:

In 2002, …Mr. McGoldrick began frequently working 21-hour days and traveling three weeks each month. He typically would land in Hong Kong at 11 p.m., and go home to work. It would be noon in New York, so he’d participate in three hours of conference calls to review the credit and asset value of U.S. partnerships under consideration. At 3 a.m. Hong Kong time, he’d go to bed until 6 a.m., when he’d rise to review the unit’s Asian investments and markets….

Around [the end of 2006], Mr. McGoldrick got sick. Frequently on the phone or on an airplane, he developed severe bronchitis, with a hacking cough. He couldn’t get through a phone call without throat lozenges for 100 consecutive days, a person familiar with the matter says. He visited his doctor in London, who ordered him to change his grueling lifestyle.

Just two simple questions here:

  1. What was it like to live with this guy?
  2. What was it like to work with this guy?

Only in America, I think to myself, can we venerate someone who sleeps three hours a night and needs throat lozenges to get through a phone call, then quits because he’s not paid enough.

I’m also trying to understand how someone who took that much on himself could have possibly been a clear thinker. Psychologist Kenneth Nowack’s recent blog post cites Alertness Solutions’ statistics on the costs of sleep deprivation: for example, a 50% reduction in critical decisionmaking ability with two hours of reduced sleep per night.

With McGoldrick’s three whole hours of sleep a night, I wouldn’t trust him to make coffee without scalding himself, never mind decide on liquidating an Asian real estate portfolio.

Hopefully whoever hires McGoldrick next has enough compensation dollars left to bring on someone to watch over him.

(Photo: a throat lozenge from jr3 via stock.xchng)

Posted in Wall Street, Wall Street Journal, balance, compensation, sleep, work ethic, workaholism | Comments

Did the Bear Stearns CEO golf too much? (UPDATE 16 July)

Monday, July 9th, 2007

In Sunday’s New York Times there appeared an article about Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne, disparaging his work ethic during the company’s recent hedge fund crisis.

By consulting GHIN, an online database for posting scores and calculating handicaps, Times reporter Patrick McGeehan determined that Cayne played golf on days when important events were playing out in the hedge fund drama. A sample:

On Thursday, June 21, as several big banks pressured Bear Stearns to increase the collateral on loans they had made to its sinking fund, Mr. Cayne was back on the course. That day, he shot a 98.

The implication is Nero was fiddling as Rome was burning–that Cayne either didn’t care, couldn’t be bothered, or delegated management of the crisis to others.

I’m deeply suspicious of the subtext of the article. I hear these undertones: CEOs are supposed to work long hours. They need to have their hands on the wheel during a crisis. Playing golf or otherwise doing something relaxing on a weekday is loafing off. Anyone who would golf on all those days must be disconnected from his company’s day-to-day reality.

But what if the truth is more complicated? Is it possible to help manage through a crisis and still get eighteen holes in after five p.m.? I don’t think McGeehan wanted to know–it could have spoiled his clever story.

I’m rooting for Cayne here. Maybe he’s more than a big-shot prima donna who lands his helicopter on the practice range. Maybe he’s figured out a way to get some balance in his life.

If, while he was out on the golf course, he was working his lieutenants twenty hours a day on this situation, that’s one thing. But if the entire executive team or for that matter if the entire company is able to create some kind of work-life balance, as opposed to grinding it out sixty or seventy hours a week, then I have three words for Mr. Cayne:

Good for you.

UPDATE 16 Jul 2007: New York Times Dealbook reports that Cayne’s club is investigating him for possibly changing his score in order to win a recent tournament at the club. If this allegation turns out to be true, then he’s a loser in my book and I will disavow what I wrote in this post. Because if you will cheat to win at golf, then you unquestionably lack balance in your life.

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Posted in New York Times, balance, golf, leadership, work ethic | Comments

Midlife Crisis, 21st Century Style

Friday, June 8th, 2007

My friends and I have been working for 20-odd years now, and midlife crisis is starting to take hold of us.

I don’t mean Porsches and trophy wives; instead our midlife crises involve trying to find meaning in our work. None of us is rich, but we can handle next month’s mortgage or rent payment without undue stress. We’re trying to find a better balance between work and family time. Each of us has accomplished a great deal, but none of us will be CEO of IBM–the goal we might have had coming out of college. If we have to work for twenty more years, it better be something we care about. Here’s a sample:

  • Tom has been with three different companies that have been sold or restructured, and is looking for something where he has some control of the direction of the company.
  • Michael has left high-tech to become president of a small company that installs advanced wiring systems in new homes.
  • Ross has left management consulting to become a teacher in New York City (go, Ross!).
  • Dan is contemplating leaving the defense contractor he works for to be one of the initial team at a high-tech startup.
  • And I’ve become a lone wolf, doing independent consulting and researching areas I’ve had a long-term passion for. And some fun things, like this blog.

So, if you see me driving around town in the car pictured above, that’s my answer to the Porsche. Our generation’s midlife-crisis car is an 11-year-old Isuzu. What does that say?

Posted in balance, career, midlife crisis | Comments

Billionaire’s brilliant quote of the week (last week’s edition)

Wednesday, April 11th, 2007

From Warren Buffett, as paraphrased by Prof. Jeremy Siegel (thanks to Greg Mankiw for pointing it out):

[Buffett] wisely counsels that anything that happens to your finances is secondary to the important things in life – picking a suitable and compatible mate, developing a relationship with your children, and doing something that you enjoy.

I’m very fortunate on the first two points–I think I’ve got them licked–and working hard on #3.

Posted in balance | Comments

Take a vacation, why don’t you?

Wednesday, March 28th, 2007

Regular readers of this blog may already realize that I’m hung up on sleep, or lack thereof (see here). Perhaps it’s because, with children just having emerged from the wake-several-times-a-night phase, I’m on a first-name basis with sleep deprivation. It also may be evidence of a career-long struggle to find balance in a culture that celebrates and honors workaholism and sleep avoidance.

At any rate, more good news for people who just want a rest arrived today. The New York Times’s Frequent Flier column profiled consultant Mark Rosekind of Alertness Solutions , a former director of NASA’s fatigue countermeasures program (now that’s a job title). His assertion? In addition to getting more sleep, you also need a vacation. Says Rosekind:

I just completed a study for Air New Zealand that suggests that if people actually took their allotted vacation time, they could improve their performance by more than 80 percent.

If you still don’t get the message, Rosekind includes a truly frightening anecdote about a TV reporter who, apparently out of story ideas, went without sleep for three days. What she experienced the last day will make you want to take a nap straightaway.

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Posted in New York Times, balance, productivity, sleep | Comments