The Consultant

Buddhists call it the "Hungry Ghost." With its expansive belly and its tiny mouth, it's an almost comical character. But what it represents is no laughing matter. "The hungry ghost can never get enough inside," explains Elizabeth Gibson-Meier. "It is always wanting. Many people today experience the same sensation. Nothing that they do feels like it's enough."

Gibson-Meier, 48, a senior consultant at RHR International Co., one of the oldest management-psychology firms in the nation, is a student of Buddhist philosophy. And she works with lots of hungry ghosts. Her home base is near Silicon Valley, capital of the Internet economy -- a place where hundreds of thousands of people are racing to work hard, to beat the competition, and to make the Big Score. Almost all of her clients are high-powered executives -- from billionaire entrepreneurs to the CEOs of public companies. In case after case, Gibson-Meier says, whether the challenge on the table is building teams or managing change, the real issue for those clients is sustainability: How much is enough?

That question has resounded throughout Gibson-Meier's own life. Her first job after earning a PhD in psychology from Stanford University was at Teknowledge Corp., a Silicon Valley software company that builds expert systems. "I really liked the faster pace," she says. "And I liked the people I worked with. They were bright; they made things happen." It helped that the majority of her colleagues were also Stanford grads. "It was like Camelot," she says. "The camaraderie was wonderful. It was exciting. These were some of the most interesting people I had ever been around."

Then, around 1987, Teknowledge hit a wall. Gibson-Meier was recruited by a company called Parc Place, a maker of object-oriented development systems. If anything, the pace there was even more frantic than it had been at Teknowledge: "You weren't thought to be working unless you were just about killing yourself," she says. Gibson-Meier had no trouble keeping up with the work. In her spare time, she even managed to write articles on object-oriented systems analysis for the legendary Byte magazine.

Without really planning it, she was living out a Silicon Valley success story. She had topflight academic training, work experience at two high-profile startups, and a growing reputation as a thinker in the field of object-oriented systems. She could have named her price at any of a dozen of the Valley's hottest companies. Instead, she walked away from it all.

"I was trying to fill a hole that had no bottom," she says. "So I decided to go in another direction -- to apply to other organizations everything that I had learned from my academic training and from the years that I spent inside companies. Making that decision was very fulfilling. I had found out what I wanted to do when I grew up." That's what brought Gibson-Meier to RHR International. In an interview with Fast Company, she offered advice on how people can appease their hungry ghosts.

Fall into the Gap

I don't believe in "balance." Too many people act as if designing a sustainable life were about allocating time and resources. What we are really talking about is solving an equation with lots of variables. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Different people have different life equations. Your own equation changes throughout your life. Answering the question "How much is enough?" is not something that you do just once. It stays with you forever.

I use various techniques to help people solve their personal equation. One technique involves pie charts. I ask people to draw a circle and then to divide it into pieces, using the question "What things are most important to you?" as a guide. Maybe "family" gets a huge slice -- or maybe, if you're young, it doesn't. I try to keep the categories open-ended, because I want to see how people express their priorities. Then I ask them to create a pie chart around the question "How do you spend your time?" What I usually find is a big gap between what people say is important to them and what they actually do with their time. That gap sets up the equation that we then have to solve: What are you happy with? What are you unhappy with? What can we do to close that gap?

You'd be surprised by how much of an eye-opener this exercise can be for people. One of my clients was the top female executive at a major bank. I started working with her at a time when she had a huge job responsibility and when she also had two young sons. And every time I talked to her, she was crying. She was really in pain. So we went through this exercise. What her pie chart showed was that she wasn't just spending too much time at work; she was also spending more and more time at work on activities that were less and less productive -- doing things that she really didn't enjoy, getting into detailed work even though she wasn't a very detail-oriented person. And she couldn't work any harder than she was already working: People were getting voice mails from her at 4 a.m.!