Are You Paying Lip Service to Work-Life Balance?

LinkedIn, Nov. 30, 2018

by Theodore Kinni

The statistics on paid time off in the U.S. are bewildering. In 2017, American workers didn’ttake 704 million paid vacation days, according to Project: Time Off. That’s $62.2 billion in unpaid benefits, and a lot of neglected families.

You might think these data points would have CEOs everywhere chortling with glee. But it seems like they are chained to their desks, too. Witness the standard CEO memoir, which pays lip service to any semblance of a life outside of work.

In the 365 or so pages of Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?, his chronicle of his years at the helm of IBM in the 1990s, Lou Gerstner, Jr. devoted a mere couple of sentences to his family. Apparently, they were aware he had been asked to take on the massive IBM turnaround. But he says he agreed to take the job during a recruiting meeting and then, went home to announce his decision. “My wife, who had been quite wary of the idea originally, supported my decision and was excited about it,” Gerstner writes, almost as an afterthought at the end of Chapter 1. If the rest of the book is any indication, he disappeared into the corporate maw immediately thereafter and didn’t pop back up in the living room until a decade later.

The similarly-lengthy memoir of Harold Burson, the co-founder of the one of the world’s largest PR agencies, is another case in point. Burson wrote a 10-page postscript titled “The Role of Family” in The Business of Persuasion, the memoir he published last year. “As I reflect on the sixty-plus years since the formation of Burson-Marsteller,” he says, “I have come to realize that, for more than fifty of those years, I deprived my family of my companionship almost half the time.” I can’t help but think this is a conservative estimate, because Burson notes that he invariably traveled during 45 or more weeks each year, including over 100 trips to Europe for 10-14 days at a clip, as well as trips to Asia for a minimum of two weeks each. Sadder yet, Burson devotes less space in the memoir to his wife, whom he admits contributed much to his career and the success of his company, than he does to his love for West Highland white terriers.

Of course, CEOs such as Gerstner and Burson are of an older generation whose standard version of work-life balance looked like Leave It to Beaver (which is the version on which I cut my teeth). But I suspect that Gen X and Millennial CEOs may not be any better. Read the rest here.