Manage Your Work, Manage Your Life

Work/life balance is at best an elusive ideal and at worst a complete myth, today’s senior executives will tell you. But by making deliberate choices about which opportunities they’ll pursue and which they’ll decline, rather than simply reacting to emergencies, leaders can and do engage meaningfully with work, family, and community. They’ve discovered through hard experience that prospering in the senior ranks is a matter of carefully combining work and home so as not to lose themselves, their loved ones, or their foothold on success. 

Those who do this most effectively involve their families in work decisions and activities. They also vigilantly manage their own human capital, endeavoring to give both work and home their due—over a period of years, not weeks or days.

That’s how the 21st-century business leaders in our research said they reconcile their professional and personal lives. In this article we draw on five years’ worth of interviews with almost 4,000 executives worldwide, conducted by students at Harvard Business School, and a survey of 82 executives in an HBS leadership course.

Finally Starting Your Business This Year? Here's Your Ultimate 12-Point Checklist

It's 2018, and you are really doing it, you are finally launching a business. Where do you start? We asked some of the top business minds what you should do in the first 90 days, a crucial time in your business's life. Get these early steps right and you'll create a sound foundation for a profitable, growing business.

The likelihood that your startup will be profitable is influenced heavily by the speed at which you launch. The number of tasks you do in those early months is more crucial to success than the type of tasks you do, although anything involving customer contact helps, according to the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics, which tracks samples of new entrepreneurs. "Those implementing more startup activities faster are more likely to see profits," says Paul Reynolds, the study's coordinating principal investigator.

Beyond the specific tasks that PSED examines--things like developing financial projections and obtaining supplier credit--startup activities tend to fall into two categories. The first is open-minded discovery. Initially, everything is assumption: financials, customers, go-to-market strategy. The only thing you know for certain is your own strengths, and even there you may be surprised.

This exploratory approach is at the core of Lean Startup. It is responsible for the disdain, in some quarters, for business plans. It is behind what's called "effectual entrepreneurship," a research-based approach that considers launching a business to be largely an act of improvisation.

The second type of startup activity recognizes that entrepreneurship is social. Doubtless you have lived with your idea for a long time. Now that you're launching, you have to get out of your head. Figure out whom you will draw on, in what capacity, and how those relationships will work. Input from partners, advisers, potential customers, and others brings new perspectives and shape to the enterprise. Networking is like raiding the fridge: seeing who might offer you warehouse space or logo-design services or an introduction to a potential customer.

To help you fulfill this most exciting of New Year's resolutions, we compiled a list of the key steps you must take in your first 90 days.

1. Walk a mile in your customers' shoes.

The idea behind minimum viable product is to get your offering as quickly as possible into the hands of customers to generate feedback. But first, you have to make sure you are solving the right problem. Market data and surveys won't tell you that. For those insights, you have to get as close to the customer experience as possible. Doing so before you commit to a solution may save you a lot of frustration. --Leigh Buchanan

Jon Kolko, founder of the Austin Center for Design and author of Creative Clarity: A Practical Guide for Bringing Creative Thinking Into Your Company, says:

"Your first job is to know your customer. Not just who she is but also what she wants, what she does, and how she feels about what she does. That means embedding in customers' lives or work.

"Ideally, you will develop a kind of master-apprentice relationship, in which you are the apprentice. Ask the customer-master to let you observe her in action. Even better, have her take you on a tour of the relevant section of her world. Reach out to friends and family on Facebook for permission to watch them do laundry or winterize their boats. Or ask potential customers if you can spend time in their offices or on their factory floors.

"Once there, ask open-ended questions about the experience and workflow. Can you show me? Why? Can I try that? Maybe the answer to that last one is no. But if it's yes, think how quickly you'll build empathy with the person who does it all day long, whose life you are trying to improve.

"This process provides a pragmatic understanding of pain points and an emotional context that lets you see things through your customers' eyes. Simply interviewing them isn't enough. People who do something repeatedly may develop a kind of expert's blindness that leaves out or obscures critical parts of their descriptions.

"You should still do this even if you think you already know how you will solve the problem. Go in with an open mind. Don't be a hammer on a nail hunt." 

2. Lead with your com­petitive advantage.

Arianna Huffington, co-founder of HuffPost and founder and CEO of Thrive Global, says:

After launching HuffPost, Arianna Huffington turned her attention to wellness, with multiplatform and consumer-products startup Thrive Global.

CREDIT: Erin & Erica/August

"For both HuffPost and Thrive Global, the first question was 'What problem are you solving and what are you bringing to the market that's not already there?' For HuffPost, the answer was a destination website where both well-known and lesser-known people could share their views on the news of the day or on culture, entertainment, and every aspect of life. Blogs were around, but they were not yet widely respected as a way to express views and communicate. Before we launched, I emailed every person of note I knew and said, "If you have a thought and you can interrupt your day for 10 minutes to share it, send it to us--we'll post it and make it incredibly easy." Within the first week, we had Larry David, Ellen DeGeneres, Walter Cronkite, John Cusack, and many more. A lot of these people could've written an op-ed for The New York Times, but the difference was with us, it didn't have to be a heavy lift. We wanted their real and unvarnished voices.

"We made a commitment from the beginning to be both a platform and a journalistic enterprise in a way that no one else was at the time. We also created a dashboard for our editors where they could see how a story was performing and do A/B testing with headlines. People talk about content platforms all the time now, but when we started, that was a new proposition." --As told to Sheila Marikar