“A Dad And A CEO”

Executive Max Schireson explains how his desire for work-life balance led him to take a step back in his career:

Earlier this summer, Matt Lauer asked Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, whether she could balance the demands of being a mom and being a CEO. The Atlantic asked similar questions of PepsiCo’s female CEO Indra Nooyi. As a male CEO, I have been asked what kind of car I drive and what type of music I like, but never how I balance the demands of being both a dad and a CEO.

While the press haven’t asked me, it is a question that I often ask myself. Here is my situation:

* I have 3 wonderful kids at home, aged 14, 12 and 9, and I love spending time with them: skiing, cooking, playing backgammon, swimming, watching movies or Warriors or Giants games, talking, whatever. …

* I have an amazing wife who also has an important career; she is a doctor and professor at Stanford where, in addition to her clinical duties, she runs their training program for high risk obstetricians and conducts research on on prematurity, surgical techniques, and other topics.

Ester Bloom ties Schireson’s story to the culture of overwork:

The amount of “all in” we require seems kind of insane. Do we want the only people qualified to lead our companies to be people without families, or with families but without interest in spending time with them? Schireson seems like a mensch who has managed to be successful in business. That’s a golden combination. Shouldn’t we as a society figure out how to retain people like that, rather than drive them out?

Kate Dries, meanwhile, focuses on the gender angle:

The responses to his blog post are overwhelmingly positive; even his daughter wrote in to say, “I’m glad you will be able to spend more time with us at home. yayyyyy.”

It’s somewhat fascinating, however, to consider what the response would be if a woman did the same thing as Schireson; she’d probably be at the receiving end of concern from other women that she was giving up her career. (Though as Schireson touches on, women who focus too much on their careers are judged just as much. Women: they can’t win.).