Work/Life Balance: Two Generations, Two Perspectives

By Sander A. Flaum and Jonathon A. Flaum

Sander: Are We Outsourcing Leadership?

The United States has never been in such an economically competitive situation since prior to the Industrial Revolution. Thanks to the labor imbalance caused by outsourcing so many services to India and China, I can get everything from my Internet customer service, Web design, and taxes done cheaper and more efficiently overseas than I can at home. Young people in India and China are not talking about work/life balance, worrying about how to spend more time at home with the kids or to plant a garden. As Thomas L. Friedman points out in his new book The World Is Flat, based on 60 hours of interviews with up and comers in Indian business and industry, as well as a variety of other sources in the business press, young people from these countries are economically hungry and extremely competitive. They are getting the kind of training and developing the kind of work ethic that will soon take them to the next level, where they'll be not only the “outsource” of American-based companies but the primary “in-source.”

The insistence on work/life balance among young American workers is threatening to catapult American business into a full-blown domestic leadership crisis. This past January at Renaissance Weekend, I participated in some panel discussions alongside some twenty- and thirty-somethings. What issues were on the minds of these best and brightest young American workers? I didn't hear a word about legacy building, maintaining a competitive edge or the importance of ongoing innovation. Instead, I heard about the need for work/life balance and how nice it is to sometimes work a 30-hour week and take a hike to clear the mind when a bit of stress comes up. In my experience, I think competitiveness and work/life balance are incompatible—there is no way you can work six hours a day, be home to play with kids for two or three hours and drive a company to the top. Taking a company to the top takes much more commitment and drive than that.

I was somewhat encouraged by an April 2005 Fast Company piece by Linda Tischler on “extreme jobs”—tales of young American movers and shakers who work upwards of 90 hours a week at high pressure jobs that they love. But admittedly, these young people make up a very small percentage of the overall workforce. An excerpt from Jack Welch's new book, Winning, as reprinted in Newsweek on April 4, 2005, sums up the advice I would give to young people regarding work/life balance: “There's lip service about work/life balance, and then there's reality…your boss's top priority is competitiveness. Of course he wants you to be happy, but only inasmuch as it helps the company win. In fact, if he is doing his job right, he is making your job so exciting that your personal life becomes a less compelling draw.”

Jonathon: A New Paradigm for Leaders

My father's concerns raise important issues for my generation and the one behind me, but his assumptions regarding the causal relationship between work-life balance and its negative impact on competitiveness may not hold up. My father is making a classic "either/or" split between the ability to lead a company to greatness and having a balanced life outside of work. I think this "either/or" model sells us short and asks American workers to compromise in ways that are unreasonable.

My father's argument is framed by a particular bottom line—global competitiveness. This has been the bottom line for most of this nation's history and while it has worked to keep us on top economically and politically, there have been other costs. The Baby Boomer generation is the largest and arguably the most economically productive in this nation's history, but their legacy also includes “weekend Dads,” “latch-key kids” and “TV dinners.” This generation was indoctrinated in the either/or mentality my father continues to advocate. They were very much a product of Welch's “making your job so exciting that your personal life becomes a less compelling draw,” but let's consider this notion in more depth. The idea that negotiating a billion-dollar merger or designing a cutting edge new video game is a more compelling draw than reading Goodnight Moon and snuggling with your child at bedtime is an absurd comparison. These activities are on an entirely different scale. Work without adequate time for intimate connection with loved ones and a bit of personal time for us, in my opinion, has long-term degenerative effects that may not show up on a company profit/loss analysis but do show up in a society with considerably more at stake than economic hegemony.

To tell the truth, I am skeptical of leaders who are all work, all the time. Without some daily personal reserves of nourishment I think burnout and diminished creativity are inevitable. I believe we can create a new work-life paradigm based on “both/and,” rather than the “either/or” attitude we've inherited from my father's generation.

So, how can we do “both/and” equally well? I think the key is focus. There can be no wasted time. If we acknowledge that life outside work is critically important to us, we must do everything we can to make our time at work critically important as well. We need to optimize our use of technology to help manage our time effectively, concentrating on the important tasks and weeding out the minutiae. Every hour of work should be structured efficiently so that we can accomplish our goals and then return home to the personal time our bodies and minds naturally crave. Too often today, the reverse is true; workdays are spent unproductively and home life becomes a frenzied race to get dinner on the table and the kids to bed. Time is too precious to allow such a sorry state of affairs to continue. Work-life balance and American competitiveness are not incompatible in my opinion, although poor time management and remaining competitive are.

The emerging leaders of my generation will be the ones who know that time, not money, is the commodity of choice. The creative optimization of time will allow us to produce exceptional work while sustaining ourselves with full lives outside the workplace.

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Author Bio: Sander A. Flaum is managing partner, Flaum Partners, Inc., and chairman, Fordham Leadership Forum, Fordham Graduate School of Business. Contact him at sflaum@flaumpartners.com. Jonathon A. Flaum is CEO of WriteMind Communications, a speech writing and speaker-coaching consultancy. He also serves as editorial consultant to the LSU Neuroscience Center and writes the “Creativity at Work” column for the Asheville Citizen-Times.

Sander and Jonathon are co-authors of the upcoming book The 100-Mile Walk—A Father and Son on a Quest to Find the Essence of Leadership (AMACOM, 2006).