Tag

ego depletion Archives - Eve Poole

Wilde’s Happy Prince for workaholics

By | Business | No Comments
Oscar Wilde wrote a heart-rending fairytale called The Happy Prince. In it, a swallow befriends the statue of a town’s late prince. From his plinth, the Happy Prince sees his people suffering, and asks the swallow to help them, using the decoration from his statue. The ruby is taken from his sword hilt, the sapphires are plucked from his eyes, and the gold leaf covering his body is torn off by the swallow, to alleviate the plight of the poor. The Mayor walks by, and looks up. Seeing the now ugly statue, he orders it to be pulled down, and thrown away.

Read More

Drunk in Charge? The CEO Sleep Scandal

By | Business | No Comments

What’s on the average manager’s mind? Too much, it would appear. In one of their periodic bedroom surveys, Ashridge Business School found that managers spend fewer than 7 hours asleep at night, and this decreases as seniority increases. Match this up with a long-day no-lunch culture, and this becomes an extremely alarming statistic. 17 hours of sustained wakefulness has been shown to result in changes in behaviour equivalent to drinking 2 glasses of wine. In the UK people who’ve drunk this much aren’t allowed to drive or operate machinery, yet their equivalents are at the helm of some of our largest companies, making really scary decisions, every single day. Should shareholders be worried?

Read More

Looking forward to feedback

By | Business | No Comments

When I was at Deloitte, and a Partner fixed you with his beady eye and barked ‘Feedback – offline!’ your knees started to knock. I gather the culture at Apple was similar, if more public, and someone I know at Tesco once had his report torn in two by Sir Terry at a board meeting and was told ‘there’s your feedback’. This Apprentice-style approach seems only to be on the rise. A recent study of contract workers reports that fewer than 7% of them would consider returning to traditional employment, and I suspect this insidious ‘feedback’ culture is partly to blame. But why does feedback have to be such a negative experience? Read More