Her answer shocked him.
By Scott Hayes, President and Founder, DBI Software
Her answer shocked him.
A friend of mine once interviewed Barbara Corcoran, the real estate mogul, business expert, and star of the television series, “Shark Tank,” about how she maintained work-life balance. He expected to discover time management gems that were her secret for thriving in every area of life.
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“A business is like a baby,” she said. “You can’t say to a baby, ‘I’m going to take great care of you from 8:00 in the morning until 5:00 at night, Monday through Friday, and the rest of the time you’ve got to take care of yourself. No, if a baby is hungry, you feed it. If it’s dirty, you change it. If it’s crying, you stop what you’re doing and see why. There’s no such thing as balance.”
Many of us read with varying degrees of horror the recent New York Times article about work and life for employees at Amazon.com, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace.” It’s a long read, but well worth it. While Jeff Bezos said that the Amazon described in the article bore little resemblance to the company he knew, his summary of the company described in the article is pitch perfect: “It claims that our intentional approach is to create a soulless, dystopian workplace where no fun is had and no laughter heard.”i
Gelsinger identifies two reasons why work-life balance is so hard:
Gelsinger offers two pieces of practical advice for achieving a better work-life balance, to which I want to add my own piece of advice:
Gelsinger: Preserve a window of family time at home. “… if you have kids, 6 to 9 p.m. is gold. Do not squander it. You might get back on email at 9 p.m., or be doing Javascript at midnight, but make sure you carve those hours out [for family time] and protect those.”iii
Gelsinger: Create family events like parties and movie nights where families and kids come into the corporate calendar so spouses and children feel comfortable on campus.
Scott: Get your work done as fast as possible so you can enjoy your family as much as possible. Your database is either a Tesla that goes form 0-60 miles per hour in 2.8 seconds, or a U-Haul that will never, ever go faster than 45 miles per hour. If you’re spending more time at the office just watching your IBM DB2 database think about the simplest query forever, then you literally owe it to yourself and to your family to take the free DBI Software 15-Second Challenge - right now.
What You Need to Know
Slow systems rob companies of your productivity, and families of your presence.
If your IBM DB2 LUW database isn’t keeping up with performance demands, or if you’ve just been handed an emergency purchase request for CPUs and memory—or you want to prevent this from happening in the first place—contact us. We’ll diagnose any database problems for free in about 15 seconds, solve a problem in two hours or less, and save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in CPU’s, memory, licenses, consulting fees, and wasted time. Frankly, we’re not very popular with hardware and database license vendors, but your CFO, shareholders, and customers will love us.
Take the 15-Second Challenge. In 15 seconds, our patented, award-winning systems will tell us exactly where the problem is, and if you give us the greenlight, we typically have the problem fixed in two hours or less. Click or call us toll free (866) 773 – 8789. |
ihttp://www.theverge.com/2015/8/17/9164047/amazon-jeff-bezos-nyt-story-response
iihttp://www.businessinsider.com/vmware-ceo-pat-gelsinger-how-tech-companies-abuse-workers-2015-8
iiiIbid.
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