An article in The Times of a while ago (Don't let the boss get you hooked on BlackBerry) referred to a study soon to be published by Gayle Porter, professor of management at Rutgers University business school in Camden, New Jersey which amongst other things ‘foresees the day when workers will be able to sue their employers for insisting that they stay in touch with the office at all times’. The BlackBerry device has certainly become a pervasive vehicle for the 24/7/365/always-on executive that I described in my book, The Leader with Seven Faces. Though it’s quite popular in Europe, my experience with my US clients shows that it has reached full epidemic proportions over there. In my last meeting with a management team there, 100% of members had one, showed one off, paid attention to one. At the next meeting, I declared a blackberry-free zone and you could see some signs of withdrawal symptoms. It used to be the mobile phone (or cell phone as it is called there) and still is, but, boy, real-time emails are now the thing.
The article in question continued to quote the professor: “Owing to vested interests of the employers and the ICT industry signs of possible addiction — excess use of ICT and related stress illnesses — are often ignored. Employers rightfully provide programmes to help workers with chemical or substance addictions; addiction to technology can be equally damaging to the mental health of the worker.” And it quoted another study: “[…] which suggests that half of BlackBerry users would find it a matter of concern if they were parted from their device, and one in ten would be devastated. More than a third said that they would feel more stressed if they had to leave the office without it, and just over two thirds felt that the device improved the way they were perceived by clients, according to the research, which was conducted by T-Mobile. In all, 90 per cent of BlackBerry users described it as a business lifesaver.”
The tone of the article in The Times, by design, was one of employers actively promoting the BlackBerry addiction (as the current form of 7/24/365 ‘presenteism”, the old requirement of physically showing up 9-5 in an office) and employees, passively adapting and becoming slaves. This is a very simplistic view, which I am deliberately ‘reading’ from The Times in a caricature. The reality is that the cases of conscious employer-led toxicity may be far less important or greater than employees-led fashion and discovery of that continuous umbilical cord with the server.
In any case, the toxicity is mutual. It means that both sides (what ‘sides’?) have commoditised space and time. By being always-on, time has ended, not only in its simply pragmatic angle of ‘physically no more time for anything else’. Space has ended. Mailboxes are full. Disk-life space run out. Since time is man’s last asset (see ‘What you Build’ chapter in my book, The Leader with Seven Faces) employees and employers are jointly walking towards asset-less organisations. It is not apocalyptic; it is real and incredible stupid. As I described in the mentioned chapter, leadership has an urgent need to protect space and time, to create it. The BlackBerry-always-on executive has capitulated. He may kid himself with the idea that he is in control of things thanks to the continuous connectivity, allowing him a rapid response to any question (including the ones contained in the 85% of unnecessary email traffic) but he is giving control away and becoming time-bankrupt.
In the book, I said that if I could think of one key and crucial role of leaders, it would be the above-mentioned ‘protection of space and time’. In some of my Executive Seminars based on The Leader with Seven Faces, we start with this topic or we simply stop there for longer. The article made me think about this again…
