Synopses & Reviews
Does it have to be this way?Cant resist checking your smartphone or mobile device? Sure, all this connectivity keeps you in touch with your team and the officebut at what cost?
In Sleeping with Your Smartphone, Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow reveals how you can disconnect and become more productive in the process. In fact, she shows that you can devote more time to your personal life and accomplish more at work.
The good news is that this doesnt require a grand organizational makeover or buy-in from the CEO. All it takes is collaboration between you and your teamworking together and making small, doable changes.
What started as an experiment with a six-person team at The Boston Consulting Groupone of the worlds elite management consulting firmstriggered a global initiative that eventually spanned more than nine hundred BCG teams in thirty countries across five continents. These teams confronted their nonstop workweeks and changed the way they worked, becoming more efficient and effective.
The result? Employees were more satisfied with their work-life balance and with their work in general. And the firm was better able to recruit and retain employees. Clients also benefitedoften in unexpected ways.
In this engaging book, Perlow takes you inside BCG to witness the challenges and benefits of disconnecting. She provides a step-by-step guide to introducing change on your teamby establishing a collective goal, encouraging open dialogue, ensuring leadership supportand then spreading change to the rest of your firm.
If you and your colleagues are grappling with the always on” problem, its time to disconnectand start reading.
Review
Ms. Perlows advice should be taken seriously”
The EconomistOur refusal to break from work often actually reduces our effectiveness and can even lead to burnout. How can you learn to let go? In Sleeping with your Smartphone, Leslie Perlow suggests that part of a leaders job is to teach his or her team to manage boundaries between work and private life. Disconnecting really is the solution: the workaholic consultants at Boston Consulting Group are proof. They made the decision to disconnect from work at given times, reviewed their work methods, and found ways to work and live better!” Business Digest (France)
"A well-presented book with lots of practical tips for the workaholics! Even if change cannot be achieved at the organisation level you still get the sense that by making some small changes to how you work you can achieve a better home-work life balance." BCS The Chartered Institute for IT
Perlow proves that we do not have to be hostages to our everyday devices - advice that is needed now more than ever.” Business Executive
So if you are looking for a way to be more effective as a manager, or team leader, turn off your phone and read Sleeping with Your Smartphone.” The Chronicle Herald
Sleeping with Your Smartphone, should be required reading for any senior executive concerned about the dysfunctionality of "always-on" connectivity.” The Observer (UK)
Sleeping with Your Smartphone provides excellent, proven principles for how to bring change into an existing corporate culture and how to empower employees to join in the fight to make the company better.” Examiner.com
If youre looking for a book title that captures the frazzled, anxious life of executives who are too worried about work to ever unplug, you probably couldnt do better than Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlows new book, Sleeping With Your Smartphone.” The Globe and Mail
Leslie Perlow makes a strong case that you do not have to sleep with your smartphone, at least not every night.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Sleeping With Your Smartphone will enlighten any team trying to sync among themselves while questioning the worthwhile of on-demand accessibility.” Business Insider
ADVANCE PRAISE for Sleeping with Your Smartphone:
Professionals of all kinds complain about the difficulty of balancing life and work, but no one has had much insight about how to fix the problem
until Leslie Perlow went out and did it. This book should be required reading for every consultant, manager, HR professional, and working parent with a demanding career.” Chip Heath, coauthor, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
Leslie Perlow has given us a modern masterpiece, the only book that really shows how to harness those irresistible electronic intruders that now invade our lives. Sleeping with Your Smartphone is packed with evidence and specific, useful steps for building productive and creative workplaces that bolster rather than destroy our sanity and humanity.” Robert I. Sutton, professor, Stanford University; author, Good Boss, Bad Boss
Leslie Perlow, one of todays leading experts in how organizations really function, has applied her prowess to a question that bedevils every professional: what impact does working harder and longer have on our achievements and our happiness? The answers in this marvelous book reveal that keeping our lives in balance is more important than we ever imaginedfor ourselves and our organizations.” Clayton M. Christensen, author, How Will You Measure Your Life?
Who doesnt want to build more effective and engaged teams? Sleeping with Your Smartphone illustrates counterintuitive insights and practical actions to get it all done in our multitasking, hyperconnected world. The book shows how teams can improve work-life balance and increase company engagement while upping their outputall with a few small, doable steps.” Sara LaPorta, Senior Vice President, PepsiCo
Sleeping with Your Smartphone challenges the current belief that 24/7 is required for success and that we are hostages to our devices. Leslie Perlows strategy is brilliant because it proves that we can improve the way we live and work
by disconnecting.” Kristin C. Peck, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Business Development and Innovation, Pfizer Inc.
Truly inspiring! Sleeping with Your Smartphone shows that even in the most high-pressure environments, it is possible to disconnect and become more productive as a result. I am looking forward to implementing the strategy with my own teams.” Deborah Ellinger, former President, Restoration Hardware
Synopsis
If youre like most of todays busy professionals, then youre always on.” You cant go an hour without checking your Blackberry, iPhone, or the smart device of your choice. Surely this keeps you in tune with your team, but at what cost?
In Sleeping with Your Smartphone, Harvard Business School professor and ethnographer Leslie Perlow delves into the new connected world of work and challenges the notion that you must be constantly plugged in to be successful. Furthermore, her work and her research suggests, this 24/7 mentality is actually counterproductive.
Based on her latest research, the author recommends a radical yet simple idea: take disconnected” time off and both individual and team members will benefit.
In Sleeping with Your Smartphone, Perlow tells the story of how a simple experiment she initiated at Boston Consulting Group, an elite and competitive organization, gave way to a powerful yet manageable process that actually changed the status quo at the company. The benefits of this experiment on disconnecting” were extensive and changed the micro-dynamics of the way people there worked. In the book, she lays out the process and offers instructions on how to replicate it within your own organization. Details range from identifying a collective goal to ensuring leadership support to dealing with resistance to the process to finally socializing your findings to the rest of the organization.
For anyone who works with peopleteam leaders, managers, senior leaders, HR professionalsand is anxiously awaiting a solution to the always on” problem, look no further. Sleeping with Your Smartphone reveals the power we all have to change the norms and expectations that guide behavior in the workplace.
About the Author
Leslie Perlow is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership in the Organizational Behavior area at the Harvard Business School. She currently teaches in the Program for Leadership Development and runs a seminar on qualitative, inductive research. Perlow is the author of the books Finding Time (2007) and When You Say No But Mean Yes (2003).