Page 205 - The McKinsey Mind

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180 The McKinsey Mind

balance between work and everything else. Clearly, one person’s
balance point will be another one’s unendurable burden and some-
one else’s half load. Wherever your balance point lies, the follow-
ing lessons from McKinsey alumni will help you find it and stay
on it:

• Respect your time.
• Perform sanity checks.
• Share the load.

Respect your time. Work is like a gas: it expands to fill the time
available. This is certainly the case at McKinsey. In the New York
office, one could easily log 100-hour weeks without stint yet still
find more to do. Even in less entrepreneurial environments, like
Europe, McKinsey puts heavy demands on its employees’ time. As
Heiner Kopperman, now with Change Works, joked, “At McKin-
sey’s German offices, we liked the 35-hour workweek so much we
did it twice a week.”
When they leave the Firm, often in hopes of a better lifestyle,
McKinsey alumni are sometimes surprised to find that this princi-
ple holds just as true for positions of responsibility in other orga-
nizations. One alumnus summed it up quite well: “Work never
goes away. I come in at 6:00 every morning. I could stay until 8:00
every night and still not be finished.” In his next sentence, however,
he gives us the way out of this problem: “I could stay until 8:00
every night, but I choose not to. One thing I learned at McKinsey
was that if things are not falling apart, just go at 5:00. Take advan-
tage of the time.”
You have to decide, based on your personal ambitions, the
nature of your organization, and your place in the pecking order,
how much of your time you will devote to work. The number itself
matters only to you—it could be 40 hours per week or 90. Decide
whether that includes one or both days of the weekend.