Jack Welch and Work-Life Balance

Alec Baldwin's character on 30 Rock once said, deadpan, that "Jack Welch is the greatest leader since the pharaohs." That assessment, of course, all depends on how one feels about the pharaohs, but it cannot be denied that Welch is an influential figure in business circles, and his declaration that "There's no such thing as work-life balance....There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences," is getting some attention as a result. The Atlantic Business Channel's Daniel Indiviglio says that Welch just means that time is finite, but that Welch may be proven wrong as technology makes work far more efficient, and working from home becomes substantially easier.

Well, yeah. As someone who's been covering telework for years at this point, this is a conclusion that governments have been reaching for ages. Look, it's true that some people who want to achieve extraordinary things will undertake those pursuits to the exclusion of almost everything else. President Obama would have had a much harder time running for the White House if his wife's mother hadn't been able to step up and provide a lot of childcare. A small subset of top corporate and government jobs eat up a huge amount of that finite time.

But if industries made a collective decision that employees with better work-life balances, whatever that is for an individual, were more productive, or less likely to burn out, or to leave, or whatever, the standards for success could shift. That appears to be something Michelle Obama and John Berry are trying to promote in the federal workforce, and it could be something corporate leaders could consider as well. Folks like Jack Welch have sacrificed all semblance of a work-life balance for success because that's how the system they operate in works. It doesn't mean that having a personal life is actually an impossibility.