What exactly is 10-10-10?
It’s a way of looking at dilemmas that have no easy answer and assessing the consequences of your options in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years and bringing to bear on them your authentic values — how you want to live, who you want to be, and who you want to spend time with. When you put your options and your values together like this, you can make decisions in a way that allows you to create a life of your own making instead of your life living you.
Give us an example of how it works.
I used it with my niece just the other day. She wanted a raise but there’d been layoffs in her organization. We talked about what would happen in 10 minutes if she asked for a raise — her boss would be shocked. We talked about in 10 months, did she think she’d still be there and would she be burning any bridges by asking for the raise? And in 10 years, would the raise make a difference given what she saw herself doing? Given the consequences, she decided not to ask. A few days later they gave her a raise anyway. So there was a huge upside for her not asking.
How did you come up with the idea?
I was on assignment to speak to some insurance executives in Hawaii. I was living in Boston, it was a big long trip, and in a lame attempt to crack the code of work-life balance I brought two of my children. It was an unmitigated disaster. It came to a climax when I warehoused my kids at a hula dance class during my speech and they charged in wearing their hula skirts. I thought to myself, Something has to change. About 24 hours later, this came to me.
How is 10-10-10 any different from any other time management/resource allocation strategy, like, say, Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek?
The difference is that 10-10-10 is a decision-making process. The 4-Hour Work Week is just about time management.
You’ve written about managing human resources before in books like Winning. What are the most effective ways for people to build up their human capital?
There’s just one way — to overdeliver on your results. It’s not who you know or where you went to school. If you redefine your job as being bigger than what it’s supposed to be and then overdeliver and exceed expectations, there’s no faster, better way to get ahead. Good decision making is part of that. If you make more thoughtful decisions, you’ll overdeliver with more success. Those are completely linked.
You went to Harvard Business School and edited the HBR. But how valuable is a business degree now that as many as a third of MBAs at top schools can’t find jobs?
That’s the age-old question. There are so many examples of people who did well without a business degree. My husband is one of them: He doesn’t have an MBA, but I think you could say he’s very successful. Mark Zuckerberg, who started Facebook, doesn’t have an MBA. You can get an MBA and it’s just a line on your resume. Or you can go to business school, meet people, network with people, and dig deep into the material with a truly alive mind.
Once you have an MBA, how important it is to your career lasts about six months because any organization will know after about six months if you’re a good performer or not, and they won’t keep you around just because you have an MBA. I went to graduate school, I learned things I wouldn’t have learned if I hadn’t, like regression analysis. But it’s not the end all, be all.
Do you think the path to success for Gen Xers and Millennials is or will be different from that for Boomers?
It was until the economy crashed. Up until the economy brought them back to reality, the younger generations had ideas about empowerment and pursuing different ventures, and had a different sensibility about when the fruits of their labors would pay off. Then the economy took the wind out of their sails. It used to be a new MBA would go looking for a job with responsibility up front and work-life balance. The economy’s taught them that wasn’t going to come on a silver platter anymore.
How important is work-life balance to optimizing your human capital?
I actually hate the word “balance.” I think the term “work-life balance” suggests it’s possible to have a balance. 10-10-10 forces you to say not everything is equal, you have to make choices, and there are consequences to the decision you’re making. It helps you determine what your choices are so you can decide how to deploy your human capital.
You’ve been so publicly identified with Jack through your books and columns. Is 10-10-10, which you wrote by yourself, your declaration of independence?
Do you think having a column in Oprah magazine on my own for four years and being an executive in residence at Babson College and raising $40 million for the Boston Healthcare for the Homeless Program means I’ve been under a stone someplace? I’ve had a fully blown career, I’ve been in the workplace 30 years. Because a piece of my work is with my husband doesn’t mean I’m joined at the hip with him. If people want to see it that way, I don’t care.
