I can see what the author is saying, but... It's not necessarily about everyone working 80 hour weeks. It's about a corporate culture of 80 hour weeks. Cheating, if you get the job done, and maintain the image, doesn't discourage that culture. Acknowledging that some people are working 40 hours does.
80 hour weeks are important. It gives 40 hours for work, and 40 hours for personal growth. The former is a short cycle, and the latter is a long cycle.
1. If you trim down the growth part, your employees won't be competitive in the long term. Growth compounds, and sometimes superlinearly. If you know more, you learn faster.
2. This may be less relevant to management consulting, but if you trim down the work part, product part falls apart. I've seen organizations killed when work-life balance management stepped in. You go from 20 employees at 80 hours per week to 80 employees at 40 hours per week. Knowledge becomes much more distributed. Communication channels grow. Hiring standards slip.
In addition, if it's an 80 hour week, it becomes your life. It may sound like just 80 hours, but it dominates your life. You think about it in the shower. You dream about it. When you spend time with family, you're distracted with work and want to go work.
In practice, if I can get the same quantity of output from 20 employees as from 80 or a hundred at a higher level of quality, I can pay those employees at least five times as much. Many high-performance organizations try to make this trade-off.
But when society demands work life balance of employees with salaries starting at $300k and going into millions -- that falls flat.
Part of the obscene salaries go into making sure kids and families are healthy, even with a parent out of the house.
80 hour weeks are important. It gives 40 hours for work, and 40 hours for personal growth. The former is a short cycle, and the latter is a long cycle.
1. If you trim down the growth part, your employees won't be competitive in the long term. Growth compounds, and sometimes superlinearly. If you know more, you learn faster.
2. This may be less relevant to management consulting, but if you trim down the work part, product part falls apart. I've seen organizations killed when work-life balance management stepped in. You go from 20 employees at 80 hours per week to 80 employees at 40 hours per week. Knowledge becomes much more distributed. Communication channels grow. Hiring standards slip.
In addition, if it's an 80 hour week, it becomes your life. It may sound like just 80 hours, but it dominates your life. You think about it in the shower. You dream about it. When you spend time with family, you're distracted with work and want to go work.
In practice, if I can get the same quantity of output from 20 employees as from 80 or a hundred at a higher level of quality, I can pay those employees at least five times as much. Many high-performance organizations try to make this trade-off.
But when society demands work life balance of employees with salaries starting at $300k and going into millions -- that falls flat.
Part of the obscene salaries go into making sure kids and families are healthy, even with a parent out of the house.