Get a Life

Creating balance meant saying no. First Nadler designed a new management structure at Delta, one that made the firm less dependent on him. Then he simply started working less. "I realized that a 10% difference in how much work I did was not the difference between success and failure," he says. Indeed, Nadler now says no at least 8 weeks out of every 52: "I sit down at the beginning of the year and block out 8 or 9 weeks of time away from the office."

To his credit, Nadler understood that there is a difference between changing your attitude about work and changing your personality. He is, to put it mildly, a driven guy. And he still allows himself to be driven - but by sailing as well as by work.

Nadler attended the Annapolis Sailing School, where he took courses in cruising, piloting, and navigation. He worked his way up to bigger boats and longer cruises, sailing around the British Virgin Islands and Tahiti. He became as committed to nautical success as he is to professional success. "But it wasn't work," he says. "I find navigation satisfying. In consulting, it's not always clear what impact you're having - you work with lots of people on very complex tasks. Navigation is not ambiguous - you get there or you don't."

Talk with Nadler about his time away from his company, and you won't detect an ounce of regret. The same goes for former Clinton official Bill Galston, whose professional sacrifice was much more dramatic. Galston was at a high point in his career, with tremendous influence on the nation's domestic policy, when he chose to walk away: "If I had stayed in that very demanding job for another few years, while my son became a teenager, I would have missed some very important years to be with him. I told the president that he could replace me - my son couldn't."

Today Galston talks more excitedly about his son's bar mitzvah than about his days in the White House. "There were almost 250 people there, including family members from Israel and South Africa," he says. "It was a magnificent occasion." And it would have been a very different occasion had Galston been in his old job. "I would have been a spectator at my son's bar mitzvah. Instead, I was able to help put it together and participate."

And that, says USC professor William Gartner, is what it means to get a life: "One of the great lies of organizational life is that jobs can be as big as the people who fill them. It's not true. Teams can never be as big as our families. Colleagues can never be as big as our friends. Companies can never be as rich, as wonderful, as the people in them. We are bigger than our organizations. We just are."

Michael Warshaw mwarshaw@fastcompany.com is a Fast Company senior editor.