Balancing Acts

Everyone wants it. Few achieve it. Balance: It's the Holy Grail in the new world of work. But is it even something that any of us can have? We asked 10 business leaders and thinkers to describe their journeys toward balance - - and also to consider a few questions: In the face of unlimited business opportunities, how do you create balance in your life? How do you continue to pursue your work goals and still stay connected to the things that make you human? And finally, once you've gone overboard in one direction, how do you "get a life"? There is no shortcut to the world of balance, but here are some suggestions to help you on your journey.

Dawn Gould Lepore

Executive Vice President and CIO
Charles Schwab & Co. Inc.
San Francisco, California

Balance is less about striving for some elusive state of equilibrium than it is about making an explicit series of choices in your life. You have to figure out what's important to you, and that's what will dictate how you spend your time. I'm 44 years old. I've chosen to focus on my career throughout my life. I get a lot of gratification from work; I love the challenge, and I'm a sucker for taking on new projects. But a year ago, I had a child, and that choice has changed the entire equation for me.

I'd always kept my work life and my personal life separate. Now that I'm both an executive and a mom, I've got to be able to move smoothly between the two roles in order to remain sane. On weekends, for example, I'll be working at home, operating in "executive mode" and thinking about an upcoming presentation. Then -- oops! -- my son's diaper needs changing, and I've got to slip into my "mother mode" to clean him up. When I can integrate the two parts of my life that way, the transition comes naturally.

Having my son has made me a more balanced leader. I'm trying hard to cut back on my usual 60- to 70-hour workweek. I'm much less tolerant of activities that aren't a good use of my time, and I'm a better delegator. I frequently ask myself, Do I really have to do this? Does my organization need me to follow up on every detail? My answer often is, "No, it doesn't." Now I focus on what's important: providing inspiration and emotional support for my organization.

Still, when it comes to balance, I'm a work in progress. Do I look back and wonder if I made the wrong choices? No. But I do realize that I've given up a lot along the way: I gave up the chance to have children in my thirties -- which was a big trade-off. I gave up a lot of opportunities to spend time with my family. These are all things that I've consciously chosen, and as a result of my choices, I've increased the stress in my life. There's nothing easy about making choices. But here's how I look at it: Either you make them for yourself, or they're made for you.

Dawn Gould Lepore (www.schwab.com) has been a leader in the expansion and redesign of Charles Schwab's information systems. She is responsible for Schwab's worldwide use of information technology, including telecommunications as well as customer and business applications.

David Lunsford

Director of Advanced Technology
Dell Personal Systems Group
Dell Computer Corp.
Austin, Texas

I often hear people proudly claim that they work 100-hour weeks. The first thing I think is, How can a person really be effective for 100 hours? How effective you are is more important than how long you work. Your goal should be to hone your work habits to achieve maximum performance. But a lot of us are hooked on a tangible metric that suggests that more hours must equal better work.

In the 13 years I've worked at Dell, I can remember two times when my work style led to major burnout. I lost the inspiration to perform. I reached a point where nothing mattered. I didn't care: Fire me. Shoot me. Whatever. The work I was doing began to feel futile, a feeling that is hard to translate into productivity. When you realize, as I did, that a lack of balance downgrades your effectiveness, it's easy to make balance a priority. I finally understood that achieving balance would actually help my career.

More and more, the boundaries between work and life are being blurred by technology -- pagers, cell-phones, email. It's easy to let your work life migrate into your personal life, so you need to create a reverse migration. I do this by scheduling routine breaks in my workday to have private moments. That can mean sitting and reflecting for 20 minutes, or talking to someone who is important to me. I'm beginning to manage my personal life as if it were a business. Of course, I don't have a profit-and-loss statement for my private life. But I am much more willing today to let my private life take priority when it comes to making choices about how I use my time.

I have a very long-term view of the relationship between my work and my life. I work to have a good quality of life, not to achieve some arbitrary goal, such as a job title or a figure in a bank account. My tenure at Dell has far surpassed that of senior executives who went for the brass ring -- who convinced someone that they could succeed but who failed to deliver over the long haul. Now they're gone. So who really did better?

Ask yourself: Is the way you're working today sustainable over the next 20 years? Then listen to your answer.

David Lunsford (david_lunsford@dell.com) has been at Dell since July 1986 and has served in various engineering and management capacities. In his current position, he is working on advanced-concept PCs.