Category Archives: Work Life Balance

Family Business Succession 4 Years Later: The Rest of the Story

Family Business, Work Life Balance, ,

There I was, minding my own business, watching my twitter flow, contemplating my next blog post, when what should appear in my twitter but … Sabrinawell, you can see it here to the right, in the Tweetdeck version: mommyceo is Sabrina Parsons, my second of five grown-up children, who has been running Palo Alto Software for the last four years. So I clicked the link to see what she wrote. We do talk a lot, of course, and we’re still in the same company, but I’ve been traveling, and I wasn’t aware of this one. She called her post Family Business Succession: four years later.

She writes (and the “he” in this is me):

He talked to me one day, and the next day, without much planning, or transition strategies, or anything, he told me and then he announced the change to the whole company.

That’s true. I did. She also credits me for staying out of her way:

Does he actually let us make the decisions? What happens when he doesn’t agree to the decisions? What does he do now? The simple answer to the question is yes, Tim actually did back off, and stay true to his word.

And that makes me proud. It isn’t easy. You build a company up and you get used to running things, and that’s a hard habit to break.  Me and my ego like to think that my every opinion should be treasured, but they aren’t. The novelty wore off and then it took some real adjustment. Fortunately, I passed  the baton to a strong woman with a lot of confidence in herself and a good team.

Sabrina’s post details some of the accomplishments. The company has done just fine for the past four years, after the big transition. We both have the right to be proud.

My biggest insight for others in similar situations is what I call the safe harbor concept. I didn’t just pass the command on and then sit around back-seat driving. I passed the command on and dove head first into blogging, twitter, speaking, and teaching. I didn’t want retirement. I love business, entrepreneurship, and business planning, so the change meant being able to do more of that. Without my having a lot of stuff to do, stuff that I think is important, I would have gone crazy; and probably I would have driven my daughter crazy, too.

What Does a Life Well Lived Look Like to You?

Advice, Work Life Balance,

What do you think of this (emphasis is mine)?

Flextime, dress-down Fridays and paternity leave mask the core issue: certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged, on a day-to-day basis, with a young family. Reality is people working long hard hours at jobs they hate to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.

Sure, you say, work-life balance is a great idea, but I’m busy. And there’s no web app for it.  You can’t do it with a spreadsheet.  Wait – can I get an app for my iPhone?

Nigel Marsh – author of the quote above, and the books Fat, Forty and Fired and Overworked and Underlaid – quit work for a year, stayed home instead, and discovered:

work-life balance is easy when you have no work.

The video here is 10 minutes of Nigel on work-life balance at the recent TED Sydney. It’s funny, it’s insightful, it’s short, and it makes a lot of sense.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

(if you don’t see it here, click here for the original)

I suppose it’s ironic that I like the following quote, given that I’ve been an employer for 20 years, but I do; I think it’s good advice:

Never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial corporation. I’m not talking about just the bad companies, but all companies. It’s what they do, even the good, well-intentioned companies. Daycare in the office for example is so you spend more time at the office.

And he finishes with this summary (emphasis is mine again):

Small things matter. It’s not dramatic upheaval, it’s small things. If enough people do it, we can change society’s definition of success, so we can all have a better view of what a life well lived looks like.

It’s Easier to Build a Business Than Find a New Spouse.

Advice, Work Life Balance

Here’s a thought: a healthy relationship makes both of the people better for it. Both people win, or neither one wins. Are you better, and better off, because of your spouse? Is your spouse better, or better off, because of you?

And then there’s business, life, and relationships. Is your relationship better off for your business? Is your business better off for your relationship? Shouldn’t they be?

I happened to notice what Darren Rowse  called The #1 Reason My Blogging Grew Into a Business. Darren does Problogger, so he is one of the 10  or 20 most successful small business bloggers in the world. Here’s his #1 reason: 

The funny thing about this moment is that it wasn’t a discovery of some secret way to make money blogging, it wasn’t the day I started one of my blogs… in fact it was a moment that didn’t immediately lead to any particular change on my blogs – because it was largely something that happened in my mind – a paradigm shifting moment.

It all started with 9 words from my wife ‘You’ve got 6 months to make blogging full time.’

Now that is relationships making people better, and relationships making businesses better.

True Story: Home is Where Business is Good

Advice, Entrepreneurship, Work Life Balance, , ,

We were in our early twenties, and he was in his late forties. We knew him as the quintessential Oregon lover, born and raised in Oregon, running a lumber business, loving the advantages and ignoring the disadvantages of living in Eugene. He was smart, successful, and very easy to like. We both liked and admired him.

Then one day he told us he had to move to Los Angeles. We were shocked. We offered our condolences. We couldn’t imagine somebody who would be less happy moving to Los Angeles.

But he surprised us. Here’s what he said:

“No,” he said. “And this is important. You are both young, you need to watch me move to Los Angeles, and learn this lesson. Home is where business is good. I’m going to move happily.”

We spent some time with him a couple years later, after we’d moved from Oregon to Mexico City. He was true to his own advice, happy in Los Angeles.

We’ve reminded each other about that many times over the following 40 years. I can’t say we’ve actually followed his advice, because that situation never came up for us; but we think maybe we would have. And It came up in a family conversation recently, and I want to share it here, as good advice given.

This New Year’s Resolution is About Time

Advice, Reflections, Work Life Balance, , , ,

On this last working day of this year, staring 2011 in the face, I’m reminded: Time is the scarcest resource. Don’t waste it.

In the 1987 Wall Street movie, as they board his private jet, Gordon Gekko tells Bud Fox:

Real wealth is not having to waste time.

Meanwhile, somebody suggested to me that we can all tell our real priorities by tracking how we spend our free time.

Sure, like you probably do too, I spend most of my time getting work done, sleeping, eating, traveling, and so on (no Gordon-Gekko-like wealth for me). But how much of my free time do I spend on the people and pursuits I value most? How would my downtime like television compare to time for relationships, or exercise, or writing, or reading? How would that look for you?

But that line of thought gets ugly fast.  Let’s move on.

And do you allow enough time for settling things? Do you get enough silent time to hear yourself think? How much time are you alone without the txt, email, music, video, or web? How much time are you alone with people you care about?

So what’s my resolution? I’m working on it. Give me some time.  

The Business Lesson on the Stairway to Heaven

Advice, Entrepreneurship, Reflections, Work Life Balance,

What’s “the stairway to heaven” to you? Is it about God and Heaven? A metaphor for business growth, maybe? I think of the Led Zeppelin song and a picture on the album cover something like the one here. It’s a long stairway heading up into the sky, with landings or stopping points, and changes of directions.  Which is a lot like business, at least business in the front lines of startups and entrepreneurship.

Business is a lot of climbing. Even as an entrepreneur, doing something you supposedly like, it’s still a lot of struggle. It’s late nights and early mornings and spreadsheets and presentations and airports and hotels. It’s worries about cash and hiring and firing, making do when you have to, and building something better whenever you can. That’s the stairway. We hope it’s going up.

The landings are pauses. You stop the climbing. You look around. You check the landscape, taking a fresh look. What’s changed while you were concentrating on taking those specific steps? Are you still moving up? Are there new options?

Are you still okay with your planning? Or does your plan need to change? Are you still moving in the planned direction, towards the planned objectives? If not, why not? And what do you do about it?

And don’t forget to ask whether you are still enjoying it. Is it still what you wanted to be doing with your life? Is it blocking the view of more important things (like people), or, we would hope, helping you help them and relate to them. Have you forgotten everything except the damned stairs?

When I was young, backpacking in the High Sierra, straining under the weight of the pack, struggling up a long uphill stretch at 10,000 feet altitude, I would occasionally stop, relax, breathe, and consciously enjoy the beautiful view of the mountains around me. I would forget the struggle of walking up hill with a pack and remember why I was there. The mountains made me happy. They were beautiful.

Do yourself a favor. Pause. Take it all in. Reorient yourself and your business. Take a fresh look.

(Image credit: Saiva_l/Shutterstock)

Is Work Life Balance in a Startup A Good Thing?

Advice, Back to Fundamentals, Work Life Balance, ,

What do you think about this (quoting a discussion at thefunded.com):

I Don’t Believe in Work Life Balance as a Startup Person. Am I Wrong?

In the discussion on thefunded.com, the person who asks the question is co-founder and CEO of a startup, and is working 60 hours a week. But there are problems: 

I wish we all would work like there’s no tomorrow, at least until we reach certain status where we can be confident that we have reached product market fit… However my co-founders have their families and they have to go home when work hours end … I am very dissatisfied because I feel like we can do much more if we tried harder.

If you get into that discussion, you’ll see that the startup community there is divided. There is no consensus.

Just yesterday blogging guru Chris Brogan posted an eloquent argument for balance in his Pay Yourself First:

But when you wonder how I’m getting as successful as I am, oddly, it’s because I’m doing the opposite of what you’d suspect. I’m working fewer hours now than I used to work last year. The trick of it all is that I’m working the right hours, and I’m managing my time and demands on my time much better.

This question keeps coming up. I jumped on a similar discussion a couple of years ago, when I posted Is Startup Life Life, which followed a public debate about work/life balance triggered by this zinger from Jason Calcanis in his How to Save Money Running a Startup: 

Fire people who are not workaholics. Come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. Don’t work at a startup if you’re not into it. Go work at the post office or Starbucks if you want balance in your life.

Me? I’m not sure.  I hope for that happy medium, the gray area that isn’t either black or white; a startup that people believe in enough to work like mad, but one that gives them meaningful work to do, and one that hopes they manage to preserve a life as well. As if that were possible.

Women in Entrepreneurship and Controversy in Blogging

Current Affairs, Weblogs, Work Life Balance, ,

It’s pretty much common knowledge that there are far fewer women than men running high-tech high-end (meaning visible, getting buzz, getting investment) startups. That’s bad news, right? I thought it was obvious. 

But apparently it’s not obvious. Say, what?

Well, for example, there’s Penelope Trunk’s Women Don’t Want to Run Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children, posted over the weekend on TechCrunch. She wrote:

There’s a reason that women start more businesses than men, but women only get 3% of the funding that men do. The reason is that women want a lifestyle business. Women want to control their time, control their work, to be flexible for their kids.

So having a life is a feminine trait? Work-life balance is a business failing of women? I think not, but she says:

For men it’s different. We all know that men do not search all over town finding the perfect ballet teacher. Men are more likely to settle when it comes to raising kids. The kids are fine. Men are more likely than women to think they themselves are doing a good job parenting.

Wow. Do we like stereotypes? At least she’s giving us equal opportunity stereotypes, insulting both genders at once.

I think Penelope Trunk writes stuff like that for the same reason that blowhard talk radio idiots say the dumb stuff they do: it works commercially. Exaggerated opinions on radio generate listeners, and controversial blog posts generate traffic. Penelope Trunk is very smart, very successful, a ground breaker, a great blogger, and she loves controversy.  This is the same woman who posted Get married first, then focus on career as if that were her advice to young women. And Forget the Job Hunt. Just Have a Baby Instead. I like her writing too much to believe she’s serious. Do you think she moves to the absurd to make the opposite point?

What do you think? Do you think gender difference explain why women are under represented in high-tech startups? I don’t.

Read Vivek Wadwha’s thoughtful Men and Women Entrepreneurs: Not That Different on TechCrunch yesterday. You should read it. It’s nice to see common sense backed by research.

Yes, sure there are gender differences. Thank heavens there are. But they don’t justify unequal opportunity. They don’t explain the startups gap.

Vivek, on the other hand, makes two specific suggestions: first, when hiring, interview at least one woman. Second, include one woman on the recruiting team. He concludes:

These are pretty simple remedies. I am not advocating that companies institute any kind of affirmative-action programs or stack the deck against men. But we need to recognize that negative stereotypes such as the ones highlighted in TechCrunch can be harmful and lead to discrimination. Let’s not blame anyone, but let’s act proactively to fix a problem that we all know exists.

I second that.

What do you think?

Take a Break. Get Out for a While. Do Something for Yourself.

Advice, Work Life Balance, , ,

I really like Anita Campbell’s How to Put the Life Back Into Your Company post yesterday on the American Express OPEN Forum. She starts:

After the past two years of the recession – watching expenses like a hawk and keeping a close eye on receivables – it wouldn’t be surprising if you ended up with a bunker mentality.

That certainly hit home for me.

Anita goes from there to some very good suggestions taken not from the standard small business cliches we’re all tired of, but rather, from real experience, related to real people. Like get out of the office for a while, for example; and do something just for you. This is good advice.

Here’s Anita’s list. My advice is that you read the original post for her full suggestions.

  1. Remind yourself why you started or entered the business.
  2. Reflect on those who rely on your business.
  3. Get out of the office.
  4. Find something to celebrate.
  5. Do something just for you.

For that last point, I can’t resist finishing this one with her explanation:

Getting burned out won’t help a thing. It saps your energy. Do something just for you… a family vacation, some golf, reading a book, visiting an attraction. Find time to recharge your body and soul and you’ll bring more enthusiasm to your business when you get back to work. Encourage your staff to do the same.

And I’m glad to report that this post today catches me practicing what Anita suggested: I’m on vacation in the San Juan Islands. I took the picture below yesterday, from cliffs where we were sitting and watching when a group of Orca whales swam by, diving and blowing and jumping, as close as 50 yards away. This impromptu iPhone picture isn’t great, but the moment was. The picture includes two Orca whales, four of my grandsons, two of my daughters, my son-in-law, and my wife. Life is good.

whale watching

(Image credit: me and my iPhone)

On the Value of Good Computer Games

Reflections, Technology, Work Life Balance, , , ,

My thanks to Chris Brogan for posting Games and Fun on his blog this morning, linking to Jane McGonical’s Gaming Can Make a Better World video on TED.com (embedded below).

In his post, Chris says:

Forget the rest of my blog post and just watch this. Ask yourself whether or not you could make more fun and more games out of what we all do for a living.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Which reminds me that I think some kinds of games are great teachers. I’m very grateful that I spent a lot of time as a kid playing strategy games, particularly the Avalon-Hill strategy games that took hours and involved lots of cardboard pieces on maps. I played that one forward with my own kids, in a sense, by spending time with them on computer strategy games, most notably Age of Empires. I think a good game is a powerful lesson. Especially when it’s fun.

I should add, though, that I’m talking here about good games. The strategy games teach. And a lot of other types of games are quietly teaching while doing. Think of the word games, puzzle games, role playing games. Take a look at Civilization, the game.

And I have to add that I’m definitely not saying all computer games are good for anybody. Obviously. There are a lot of computer games out there that are mind numbing or (think shoot-em-up) worse. In my opinion.