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MYTH: HARD WORK ENSURES SUCCESS

How many times has your subconscious lectured you on the virtues of keeping farmer's hours and performing back-breaking toil just as you sat down to watch some weekend sports on television? I've heard that voice too, and sometimes I listened to it, just because people I admired were saying the same thing. Harry Gray spends so much time on the job that his employees say, "Harry thinks a vacation is coming to work in a sports jacket."

But hard work and endless hours are not necessarily a direct route to success. This is one area where athletes have often been smarter than their business counterparts with their M.B.A.s and pressed silk ties. How well do you think your favorite pro football team would play on Sunday if it went out and exhausted itself on Saturday? In pro football, you use Mondays for films and analysis of the previous game; Tuesdays as your day off; and Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays for hard workouts.

But Saturday is always fun day - the day when you bring your kids to practice and you work out in your shorts. Saturday is the day to prepare your mind, not your body. Officially you prepare your mind by going over the game plan and running through the plays, discussing once again what to expect from the next day's opponent.  Unofficially you prepare your mind by simple relaxation. Saturday is meant for making cracks and pulling pranks - the things that help gel the team into a single working spirit for the game ahead.

Old Casey Stengel, repository of half the baseball wisdom in the history of the game (Yogi Berra owns the other half), had a similar way of getting his ball players up for their games.  According to writer Maury Alien, he was "a tremendous organizer, determined that his players would be moving at all times." His players would warm up on calisthenics, work in the field, take laps around the park, be in constant motion until their hitting turn came. They wouldn't lounge around at the batting cage, but neither would they work out so thoroughly they'd already played a whole game in their minds. This was Casey's way of keeping everybody loose and limber for the big games.

In business, it's crucial to keep your mind pruned for opportunities, to stay aware of changes going on around you. You can't do this well when you're constantly drained by nine-to-nine shifts. Your best ideas may come when you're on the slopes or in a game of touch football.

Even Jack Welch, the young, hard-driving chairman of General Electric, knows that some time off can do wonders for his creative mind. Jack works about forty-two hours per minute, but he also knows how to play hard. If he's racing around to G.E. plants all over the country, he often suddenly stops off somewhere in Colorado so he can "ski like hell for four or five days."

If you're working all the time, you're working against yourself. You're not being your most productive.

Once I was visiting with a leading textile company in South Carolina. One of the vice-presidents invited me for a drink after work, so I came by his office about five-thirty and asked if he was ready. He looked at me as if I were a crazy man.

"Nobody leaves before seven o'clock," he said.

"Why?" I asked. "Do you have more work to do?"

"No, we just all stay until seven. That's when the boss leaves."

If you're staying around your office with no real work to do just because the boss is there, you're not working productively. Part of productivity is rest, recreation and renewal. If you're coming in on Saturdays not out of necessity but out of inefficiency, boredom or guilt, you're not working productively. You may think you're working hard, but you 're not working smart. That would be about as productive as forcing the Minnesota Vikings into a full-dress, hard-tackle workout on the Saturday before a game.

Your goal as a productive businessman should not be to work harder, but to work smarter. I think even Harry Gray would agree with that.

My personal style is to build recreation right into my schedule every week. If you are working all the time, you're actually wasting company time. You serve your job better by allowing your mind to leave work so you can come back fresh and see problems with new insight, determination and a stronger fighting spirit. Some of my most creative work is done when I'm sitting still - often in airplanes. One weekend I treated myself to a few days off in Lake Tahoe, California. I relaxed, but I kept limber. I left the hotel Jacuzzi and the golf course with a notebook full of new ideas for my company. Some of them I know would have even beaten old Casey.


FACT: Don't work harder, work limber.

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