What's New

Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work by Leslie A. Perlow. Where Schulte provides the structural diagnosis of why the boundary problem is so persistent, Perlow provides the empirical evidence that the structured boundary actually works commercially and that the always-on assumption that prevents founders from creating it is not supported by the performance data. Her field study of Boston Consulting Group teams, in which structured predictable time off was introduced for people who had previously been continuously available, found that the protected non-work time produced better team performance, higher client satisfaction, and higher individual wellbeing, not the performance cost that the always-on culture predicted. For the founder whose primary objection to deliberate boundary creation is that the business cannot afford the disengagement, Perlow’s research is the most directly applicable available evidence that the objection is empirically wrong.