WEEKLY WAITE-O-GRAM (RELEASE 5.0)

DEADLY SIN #3: HINT...IT'S NOT SLOTH!

You were probably expecting to hear about lack of life-work balance as Deadly Sin #7. Sort of a throw-away at the end. Wrong. I debated making it #1 -- but chickened out because I knew most CEO's (and C-Suite wannabes) would view it as a "soft" issue. In reality, spending time with family, taking vacations, developing outside interests, etc. can be incredibly difficult for individuals who have spent their entire lives on the corporate fast-track. However, if you want to succeed as a CEO...and enjoy the ride...you need to slow down. The sprinting is over...you now need to settle in to the rhythm of the long distance runner...without the loneliness.

LENGTH (OF TENURE) DOES MATTER

I don't want to mislead here -- according to a recent article in Forbes Magazine, the average tenure of a US CEO is now 6.1 years. This is actually a slight lengthening from a year earlier ... but well short of the 9.8 year average CEO tenure reported in 1999. Your objective, however, isn't to be average -- it's to succeed. And to succeed long-term you need stamina, pace and balance.

TAKE YOUR VACATION!

First of all, take vacations. Real vacations. No blackberry. No daily conference calls. No claims that you are hiking the Appalachian Trail...when you are actually enrolled in a Harvard Business School brush-up session. And don't leave one job on a Friday...to take up a new one on Monday. You think this looks macho...others think it is either showing off...or just plain dumb.

TAKE IT FROM ME...

If you fail to take any time off...at some point it will catch up with you. In the mid- to late 1970's I jumped from assignment to assignment, from job to job...with no down time. I went straight from serving as a correspondent in Warsaw, Poland... to a job as founding managing editor of a Sunday newspaper in Massachusetts... to press secretary to a United States Senator in Washington, D.C. The DC job was especially challenging, as the Senator, Edward Brooke, was up for re-election. Finally, in late November of 1978...I took my first vacation in years...traveling to the Yucatan in Mexico. In the second week of that holiday... the world around me seemed to drop down into a lower gear, like a film shifting from fast to normal motion. It was only then that I realised how much I had needed to get away. Non-stop work can make anyone a little crazy (as can non-stop vacationing...but that's another story.)

PLAYING 'MONOPOLY' DOESN'T COUNT

So take all of your vacation time...and make sure at least one holiday per year is two weeks or more in duration. Your movie will not slow down until that second week. But vacations alone are not enough. You also ideally need an outside interest or two to take you away from the pressures of the day-to-day job. One executive I worked closely with, John Thompson of IBM, had sailing as one of his outlets. As busy as he was as CEO of IBM Canada, he would schedule himself out of the office at 4 PM on race days...make his way down to Lake Ontario...and head out on his boat.

FLOWER POWER

Another executive had a passion for orchids...and would actually schedule "orchid time" to spend with his prized plants. (The fact that the orchids to my knowledge never asked him for bigger bonuses, raises or complained about their fellow orchids was probably part of the appeal.) The point is, find something... military history...cooking...tennis...skiing...that takes you away and concentrates your mind, blocking out the pressures of the job. And schedule it...or it will never happen. Jim Dryburgh, CEO of Balanced Worklife Company, says that the biggest problem for most CEO's is that they are "scheduled 110% of the time" with short horizon concerns. You need to carve out time for reflection regarding longer-term strategy...but you also need to build in personal time as well.

PLUS YOUR FAMILY WILL REMEMBER YOUR NAME

Will better work-life balance make you a better CEO? Probably, because it helps to be perceived as human when you are at the top. Will it guarantee that you have a longer tenure in the job? Hard to say for sure -- I have no seen any hard data. But intuitively it seems likely.

FULL DISCLOSURE

 The GRAM is being written from the Island of Kauai, where I am ensconced with my family, living in a local rented home for a couple of weeks. By writing this... I am in a sense breaking my own rule regarding getting completely away from work. I plan to admonish myself as soon as I finish typing.

( The views expressed are entirely those of the author, who takes full responsibility for any errors, omissions or misstatements. To learn more about Waite + Co. please visit www.waiteandcompany.com <http://www.waiteandcompany.com/>  Should you have any comments, feel free to send them to robert@waiteandcompany.com Aloha.)