Final Posts: 3 of 3 (Three Truths)
Lately, my posts have been painfully long. Therefore I’ll keep the final post short, very short :)
I’d like to share three truths I learnt from this year.
- Management is an art;
- The most important life skill is the ability to ask right questions; and
- Business is a moral activity.
~
I’ve loved sharing my thoughts. Next Month, I’ll move to a new address called Emotional-Swimming (to be confirmed)
Cheers & Thank you!
Final Posts: 2 of 3 (Vlerick Interview)
As I close the blog, I’ve wondered about how I have changed in the past year. The answer is “In many ways, and for the better” and I guess a single post wouldn’t adequate the detail the entire story…
Vlerick was kind enough to publish an interview with me for the Alumni Magazine, I’m not sure when the magazine is out, but the interview questions made me think about the changes over the past year… here’s the transcript.
Interview Ashwin Chandrababu
1. Could you please briefly describe your professional experience/career so far?
I have been part of the finance and accounting operations of Hewlett Packard during the seven years of my career before MBA. Working in a large organization like HP provides many opportunities to gain experience in various roles. I was fortunate to have a chance to contribute as a people manager of 20 professional in finance operation team, business process analyst managing process improvement and compliance projects of both Europe and Asia Pacific regions, as a project manager driving ERP deployments and a Process Tower Lead managing business process transformational projects and implementing shared service organization.
2. Why did you choose to follow a course at Vlerick? (Why that particular course and why Vlerick?)
Vlerick met the threshold requirement of a business school with an international and mature student cohort and an intimate class environment. Given that I myself belonged to a virtual team of 16 professionals representing 12 nations in my previous career, I knew fully well the value that diverse cultures and perspectives bring to the learning experience. The average experience and age was also an important factor because my preference was to spend time with fellow students who had significant work and life experience and not only block buster GMAT scores. Beyond these two factors, the fact that I had spent about a year in Belgium before and most importantly my interview process with Vlerick helped with my decision.
3. What is your in-company project? What does it involve? Is it in a similar area to the branch you want to work in or already work in?
Our project was about helping the regional management team of a large company, responsible for more than a billion dollars of revenue in General Western Europe region, define and implement an improved go-to-market model.
I was able to secure this project through the networking and mentorship opportunities available at Vlerick School and securing projects on your own has its advantages. When I interviewed with the Managing Director of the company about the various possibilities of a project, I was specific to let him know that I would love to leverage my previous experience and the knowledge from the MBA course, but wanted to gain experience and learn about an area that I was not previously exposed to. He was kind enough to offer this project in the sales and marketing area with which I previously had little exposure and I’m glad to say that the learning experience has been fantastic.
4. What do you plan to do when you have completed your Vlerick course? What changes will this involve?
Professionally, nothing is decided at this point. I do however go back to the market with a different attitude towards career. As much as milestones (aka. Promotions and positions) are important; I do believe that I will primarily choose roles based on the opportunities that they provide me for accomplishments every day. Having spent a significant part of my career in the delivery organization of services, I would consider designing solutions and products to solve customer problems as worthy accomplishments and would like to eventually lead an organization responsible for the entire value chain. I’m not especially particular about the industry that I would like to be part of because I do believe that customer problems exist in every sector and therefore there is enough scope for creativity in every sector.
5. What branches take your particular interest? Or do you have a passion that is not linked to any branch in particular?
I can claim without any hesitation that “The Modern Firm” written by John Roberts is the business book which has by far influenced me the most (professionally). I’m certainly passionate about the topic that it deals with which is Organizational design for performance and growth. It has changed my idea of firms and organizations as merely vehicles of monetary profit generation and much more as useful vehicles through which much value is added to the society and progress in human history. I know that this sounds almost philosophical, but it is this kind of revelation that has gotten me interested and even passionate in the field of organizational design.
6. What important moments have marked your professional life so far?
In spite of giving this question a hard thought, I’m unable to pinpoint one or a few moments that have marked my professional life. The reason is that the way I planned my profession for the first seven years has been much less driven by achieving milestones of salary and promotions and much more driven by seeking new opportunities to learn. In the seven years, I’m happy to claim that I have taken up six different roles in four divisions and each one of them has been valuable in my learning experience.
If I must pin point which specific moment provided me significant lever in career progress, then it must the opportunity to lead 20 professionals at a very early stage in my career. The challenge was that most of my team members had significantly higher work experience and educational qualification and this experience in a way reinforced my working style of respecting every colleague for how well I can partner with them and not based on their position in the corporate hierarchy.
7. What has been your biggest challenge up to now?
Having to decide to quit a secure job in a shaky economic environment and invest literally all my savings into the MBA has been a challenging decision. Since I come from India, it was also equally challenging to make the decision of leaving my mom alone back in Bangalore. Meeting these challenges alone would have been practically impossible, but I am fortunate to have great friends and family who supported me with this endeavour. My friends have paid a significant portion of my tuition and my mom has been more brave living alone for the entire year that I ever thought she would be. She has learned to switch on the computer just so that we can speak on Skype and is also taking music lessons : )
8. Has your education at Vlerick already had an effect on your professional and/or personal life? In what way?
It is not an exaggeration to claim that this year has been life changing experience. Professionally speaking, I go back with a wide range of skill set that I can offer to the business world. These wide range of skills open up many new opportunities, when the demand in general economy will grow again, which I simply could not have pursued before.
Also, what I have realised is that there is, or at least should be, very little difference between my professional and personal life. For example, I go back with a much better understanding of myself, especially my weaknesses and this knowledge helps me both professionally in choosing which kind of people I must partner with to counter my weaknesses and by doing so, it directly affects my personal life too.
I do want to point out that among the things I have learnt this year, a significant portion was learnt outside the classroom during interaction with my classmates, professors and mentors, general life in Leuven and most importantly, just having all the time to reflect on myself and not worry about how to meet next week’s performance targets in office. The educational experience after a few years of work experience is very different compared to my experience during bachelors program.
9. Have you already benefitted from the network you have developed through Vlerick?
Today I can boast of knowing personally two CEOs in Europe. I can also boast of knowing a few future CEOs in making among my friends in the MBA class. I do very strongly believe that the networking opportunities in Vlerick are great. It is a different question about how we see the purpose of networking. In the large scheme of work, if it is networking opportunities for future partners, customers, competitors or even employees that we seek, then the Vlerick experience is very good, however, if the purpose is to find a specific kind of job in a specific sector of a specific country, then I’m afraid, Vlerick alumni is not so spread out around the world – at least not today. I have benefited from the network for I have been able to interact with some top business leaders in Belgium and future leaders around the world to the extent that I can seek their counsel and reference for any of my future career decisions.
10. What motivates you to do what you do?
Three lessons that I learnt from an early part of my life have stuck with me and influenced why I pursue whatever it is I pursue.
Firstly, on the final day of our bachelors program, our academic dean persuaded us to strive to be the best at whatever it is we do. My dear friend from college made a strong argument about why he wants to anything he does with dignity and my father during our evening walks lectured me about how I should help others and even if I can’t, I should never intentionally hurt anyone.
What these three people told me motivates me in what I pursue: Tasks and accomplishments that I believe I can be best at, that are dignified and that I believe will help others or at the very least not intentionally hurt anyone.
11. Where do you come from and where do you live now?
I was born, raised, educated and employed in Bangalore, India. I’ve been fortunate though to have travelled to many parts of the world through my work before I reached Belgium for my MBA. Today, I live in Leuven which is where our school campus is located.
12. Are you currently employed?
Currently, I’m employed because I opted for a leave of absence from my previous company, Hewlett Packard and I believe is was a very wise decision!
Final Posts: 1 of 3 (Graduation day)
Its been a while since I posted on this blog. I am an MBA!! actually, I’ve been an MBA since July 3rd : )
Immediately after the graduation ceremony, I drafted a post which I did not publish. I felt the post did not have a clear argument and needed a second thought. It was about how business schools claim that they are partly responsible for the economic crisis. Well, its been more than a month since I drafted this post and the gravity of the economic crisis seems to have subsided, yet my opinion has not changed (the argument is still weak I admit). I’ve decided to publish it anyway : )
In my first post, I wrote “Time literally shrinks when you do so much every day. It’s truly scary. I can foresee the day when I tell myself “Wow, its already graduation day!” It was exactly how I felt yesterday and now the feeling is “Wow, the graduation day is over… I’m a Master of Business Administration!”
The graduation ceremony itself was an anti-climax however. I would have loved to graduate with a sense of celebration and yet the school, just like many business schools around the world, seemed to find it fit to take us on tour of their self imposed guilt trip about how business schools are responsible for the current economic crisis. What began as a blame game between regulators, bankers, economists and rating agencies seems to have now become a prestige issue; everybody wants a piece of the guilt pie because if you indeed are part of it, it means that you were somehow influential enough to be responsible for a trillion dollar catastrophe!! I’m assuming the next in list will be the Madoff’s mom who will come back and claim she is responsible for this economic crisis because she didn’t teach her son the right ethics…it was a gloomy and philosophical end to the year. At least until we hit the clubs after graduation ceremony :)
During the closing seminar we watched a speech by Thunderbird’s president about how he feels it is “Time to rethink MBA ethics education”. Obviously we watched it because at least some part of the school’s faculty and administration subscribed to the opinions of the speaker. The speech made me so angry!! I was amazed by the irrationality of the argument.. As we were watching the speech, I had this strange feeling of watching the climax of some corny teen movie with a disillusioned basket ball coach attempting to change the world with one splendidly rehearsed talk… But unfortunately in the real world, I prefer more truth and less mushy passion. With all due respect to what the speaker has accomplished in life, I sincerely thought that the speech showed just how acutely he had misunderstood the nature of crisis, the nature of firms, the purpose of business and even porter’s 5 forces model. It was absurd.
To cap that, the speech of our dean during the graduation ceremony was again about how business schools in general are responsible for the crisis, except that he stake his claim to the moral high ground saying Vlerick is doing exactly what the other schools must do. I wished a lot more attention in his address given to the parents and spouses, many of whom had travelled long distances to be part of the ceremony and also had made many sacrifices during the year.
This year without any doubt has been a life changing experience for me. I have become a better person and a more able global citizen and it is because of the business school experience. But honestly, to claim that in a period of 11-24 months, a business school can somehow churn out students (typically with 25-30 years of life experience) who are masters of business administration and are also ethical is farfetched.
It was said that ethics education cannot be optional because being ethical is not optional and yet ask about one example of ethics and first example that comes up is bribery and the next one is this fuzzy verb called “corruption”. The problem with this topic is that bribery is not only unethical, it’s illegal and I frankly don’t think that business students have any lack of knowledge or rational capacity because of which they are tricked into indulging in bribery or “corruption”. In fact, I doubt anybody would indulge in bribery or corruption without a very careful cost benefit analysis and application of probability theory to the chances of getting caught. So unless the business schools plan to convince students about how Jesus will punish those who indulge in bribery, there is no other unknown information that they have to offer students to stop them from crime :) But then, bribery is not the only essence of ethics course… It’s far more complicated and requires a LOT more than 36 hours to teach and to understand. Now, how about a business school making a decision that they will cut short the financial management and strategy management courses and teach more ethics (maybe 60 hours). I wonder how many students would apply to that school and pay the mind-boggling tuition fees for each of those 60 hours!! I wonder how many companies would recruit from such school!
Somehow, unlike the concepts of EOQ and multiple regression, the general assumption is that every human being in intellectually capable of ethical behaviour. Wrong assumption! Ethics depends on so many different factors that for business schools to claim that they will make a significant difference in ethical behaviour of managers with a 36 hours course seem absurd. Regulation is the only way to instil ethical behaviour in society. Education is helpful, but is no guarantee what so ever. Even the greatest thinker of 20th century like Martin Heidegger was incapable of ethical behaviour and there is no doubt he had some of the best educational background!
I’ve also heard recently about ideas of an oath taking or making management a profession (like accountants or lawyers I suppose). Two fantastically absurd ideas. If a person truly believes that an oath can be all encompassing of principles based on which he or she can be ethical throughout his career, well, he or she couldn’t be farther from the truth. Let’s hypothesise that an oath can indeed be all encompassing. The current catastrophe of the economy around the world is close to a trillion dollars. If that’s the kind of money between people and breaking an oath, I have a strange feeling that people will be more flexible about how the oath is interpreted :) Secondly, making management a profession. This is a laughable idea. The very problem with the ethical dilemma in management is the problem of principle and agency. Now, this solution of making management a profession introduces another dimension to the principle agent problem, the dimension of a barrier to entry to become the agent. Wow, wouldn’t that help the agent be more ethical, after all now he only has this proxy monopolistic power which he should not abuse :)
I could have gotten this terribly wrong, in fact every student that I have spoken to has told me so. But, I do sincerely believe that those business schools who believe they have any significant role in creating this economic crisis have gotten it terribly wrong. If anything, the crisis could be simply created because the academics failed to see that once stable assets like land and house are securitised, they begin to behave like liquid assets and not like land! But few business schools somehow insist that it is because of the lack of their ethics course!! I think this rhetoric only serves two purposes. firstly, for certain business schools to claim a moral high ground and also to differentiate themselves in the market to claim higher tuition fees in future and secondly, for business schools to console their current graduating students that since the economy is not that great and there is no free money available, students must therefore be more ethical and less greedy especially with their salaries :)
first post, I wrote “Time literally shrinks when you do so much every day. It’s truly scary. I can foresee the day when I tell myself “Wow, its already graduation day!” It was exactly how I felt yesterday and now the feeling is “Wow, the graduation day is over… I’m a Master of Business Administration!”
Studio in Leuven
Its over, almost over and I even booked my tickets back to Bangalore on Jul 31st which leaves my Studio open for rent from August 1st. Given the audience of this blog, I thought it might be a good idea to publish a post about the Studio so I can save on spending an extra month’s rent, my contract ends August 31st :)
-
- Small Room (dont exactly know the dimensions).. but adequate for me and I’m 6 feet tall.
- Free TV, Bed, Couch, Table, Study chair, Utensils and some forks and knives (Practically furnished)
- Own toilet and shower with hot water ofcourse…
- Huge Kitchen shared by two (My house mate who is in the first year of college), Kitchen is all yours from Friday afternoon until Monday morning because he is Belgian and goes back home every weekend
- Oh, I forgot to mention Free Fridge and Vacuum Cleaner
- Internet is free as well with a free wireless adapter (which I’m not carrying back home), but highly unreliable..
- Studying at home is not a good idea, although very quite… I never really studied in my Studio
- Oh, btw, I was the first tenant and first resident in the room, so its fairly clean
- Rent was 325 Euros this year… but not sure how much it will be next year… I doubt it will be increased because of strict rent controls in Leuven
- Oh free heater ofcourse.. you dont have to worry abou that
- Electricity is excluded in rent, it was 270 Euros for the whole 10 months for me
- Since its on the top floor, free view of the moon and stars as you sleep… I’m not kidding!! If you need complete darkness before sleep, this might not be the place for you except in winters!
- Finally, and beleive me most importantly, the landlord (Jeff) and his mom who dont live here are really nice people.
- Pictures are here: I must warn you I’m a very good photographer and the place in the snaps looks much nicer than in reality :)
- Oh, btw.. free microwave too along with super nice electric stove!!
Studio available on the market from August 1st!
Rationality of Irrationality
Now that it is job hunting season, which it has been for a while for most students, my assumption is that it’s not only hard to find good opportunities in the current economy, but even more difficult to negotiate on good pay terms once opportunities are found. The reason is when the potential employee has a very low BATNA (Best alternative to negotiated agreement), the employer can indeed push terms favorable to him forcefully.
In analyzing this situation, I concluded that it is more beneficial to be irrational rather than rational… For example, let’s say X’s aspiration base is $ 300,000 (Yes, I know that’s an outrageous aspiration aka investment bankers’ aspiration… hehe) and his base expectation is $ 200,000 (I think I should remember what one of the investment banks told students a few months back – that they plan to hire 1 employee from Belgium!).
Any case, X finds and is chosen for an opportunity in company Y and it can afford to pay $ 250,000 and yet Y, given the current situation, only offers $ 150,000. Now let’s say X’s next best opportunity is a job at Z (not as desirable as Y’s offer) and pays only $ 100,000. What should X do?!
The rational choice in this case might appear to be that X must accept Y’s offer of $ 150,000 while knowing fully that he deserves the $ 250,000 that Y can afford to pay. Yet, I believe it might also be rational to accept Z’s offer and reject Y!
X has a very weak BATNA. In this case, it appears to me that one of the rational choices is to be irrational and not accept Y’s offer hoping that Y will not have a better BATNA either and therefore will offer to pay at least $ 200,000 which is X’s base aspiration! Of course, this depends upon what is Y’s BATNA… but the bottom line is when you have nothing to negotiate with, irrationality might be the only affordable tactic :) I guess this is the basis of the Chicken game… but interesting to think which kind of applicants would have enough courage to play that game.
Opportunity cost
Its Friday and Its a silly post :)
Recently, during lunch… I told my colleague that everything in life can be explained by economics :) I could tell she did not agree with it… or at the very least she thought I’d gone crazy… I’ve wondered if I truly meant it or if I was only exaggerating… I’m beginning to realize that I meant it :) Here’s an example of how much in life can be explained by economics.
Death! why do we fear dying? We don’t fear it for what will happen after death because clearly after death, nothing happens or can happen. OK, a religious person would believe he/she will reach heaven which is not a reason to be fearful of. I doubt anybody truly believes they will reach hell because we all have moral justification for everything we do :)
So why then do we fear dying? Economics can explain it… The reason we fear dying is the “opportunity cost” of being dead… the opportunity cost is everything we could have done by being alive instead of being dead :)
In-company projects
We are all in the final phase of MBA: The in-company project.
If my guess is right, most of my classmates are, just like my partner and I, struggling with one big challenge right now… “How to convince large corporations to appreciate the novelty of our recommendations and how to convince them to invest resources and to implement these solutions”… It’s a wild guess, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not unfounded :) Here are two perspectives to this challenge the way I’ve come to realise in this past month:
Perspective One: Cultural adaptation
The definition of “Culture” is that it is a shared and learned system of values, beliefs and attitudes. One of the first courses in the MBA was “managing across cultures”: Although we only discussed one dimension of culture which were cultures across nationality, this concept seems to be just as relevant today for the culture of the school and that of the corporations is quite different.
While the MBA year challenges us to constantly think “outside the box”, we are often required to think “inside the box” to come up with improvement ideas in companies… To be honest, to hear words like “global standards must be respected”, “this is how it’s been done for ages” and “system wise, this is not feasible” can be disorientating after having spent a year in MBA learning that these stereo types must be broken. One might argue that these barriers can indeed be broken by using change management fundamentals, but unfortunately 2 months is simply not enough time for that. Ok, so to be successful in company projects, we need to adapt quickly to a different culture. Unfortunate, but necessary adaptation. I doubt an MBA by itself can help us here… to a large extent it depends on emotional intelligence. I wonder if this is the primary reason why companies often complain that students from certain schools (often consisting young students with great GMAT scores) are too academically focused! Fortunately, I think that won’t be a problem for Vlerick for the average age and average experience of students is far higher than most MBA schools (assuming there is high correlation between maturity and age/experience).
Perspective two: Distorted view of Creativity
We often go back to the companies with “break-through” solutions which often are in fact “begin from scratch and do things completely differently” solutions :) The trouble here is that students will often go for “sexier” and high impact solutions because we after all want to begin changing the world even before we graduate and yet the companies have zero tolerance for any solution which has high risk (large variation in the chances) of success and therefore prefer only incremental improvements in small phases which will sum into significant savings. Students want “revolution” and companies want “evolution”.
Here’s the simple truth: designing solutions with “revolutionary” approach is relatively simple compared to “evolutionary” approach while implementing “revolutionary” changes is exponentially more difficult compared to “evolutionary” changes. Students often design, Companies Implement :) the fact that we come up with revolutionary solutions only means we took the easy path and does not by any chance mean we were at our creative best :)
Slovakia!
Last Wednesday, after finding out that the office will be closed until Monday, I decided that I must do something adventurous… I decided a really long drive would be fun. I met my classmates in Leuven at 11 PM on Wednesday and persuaded them to drive to Bratislava. 9 hours later, on Thursday morning at 830 AM, we hit the road… By Sunday Midnight, we had travelled nearly 3000 Kms: to and back from Slovakia! Slovakia is a beautiful country, but I will remember this trip for the sheer audacity of deciding to travel so far without informing anyone and without worrying about “what if” and thinking about “can we”… the attitude was “lets do it”…
It’s the kind of trip on which you realise just how precious freedom is… I’ll be absolutely proud of this trip when I cannot afford to do it anymore… It’s also no coincidence that this trip happened just a few weeks before we graduate… such company of friends who are open for adventure and who see unlimited possibilities is not something we find in office or among family… if we do, we are very lucky! By the way, I was lucky also because I met an amazingly kind person!! It was a chance meeting and a fascinating one… its truly amazing how life throws surprises each time we ask for one… all that we need to do is ask :)
Business Plan posted!
Having spent three full months on creating a business plan, just four days before our group’s business plan was due for the final presentation, I told my freinds that I wanted to work on a different plan and make the presentation alone, their first reaction was “ashwin, are you drunk?”.. hehe… it was by far the craziest thing I did this year (academics wise)… but I’m glad I did it. It was quite an expereince to complete the entire plan alone in 4 days.
Our scores for business plans are out today and I passed :) But I feel all that effort just to pass is not fair. So I’ve decided to post the business plan document and presentation on the net just incase it is useful (I doubt it) to anyone interested…
The documents are here!!
Work Life Balance
It’s amazing how we use phrases without ever understanding what they really mean… recently, during one of the conversations, a manager told me that he would like to reduce complexity in the organization. I immediately nodded to acknowledge, but then when I wondered what “complexity” meant… I had no idea, “Reducing Complexity in the organization” felt as much like an abstraction as “understanding shapes of clouds”.
One of the best definitions I came across was “Complexity arises when an increasing number of independent variables begin interacting in interdependent and unpredictable ways”… Therefore the reasoning was that reducing complexity can be achieved by either a) decreasing the number of variables, b) reducing opportunities for interaction or c) reducing unpredictability. In an organizational design context this either means reducing number of independent roles (or people), separating the organization into different departments with specific focus or designing management controls in a way that it becomes easy to monitor and forecast the interactions… the choice of action would then depend upon the cost and the potential benefit of implementing actions a, b or c.
Unfortunately, firms get scared just at the thought of such analysis and to realize that some concrete actions are required to “reduce complexity”, therefore they feel comfortable merely discussing “complexity” as an abstraction and not do much about it :) Is it just companies… of course not, it’s also individuals… How about each of us wanting to achieve work-life balance! Do we even understand what work-life balance means?! I wondered!!
If work and life must be balanced, then they must be different because there is no point in balancing things that are homogeneous… To understand what is (supposed to be) different between work and life, we need to first of all understand what work is and what life is!
What is work? Work is a legally binding contractual commitment with very less flexibility in terms and conditions. In fact the contract when looked at the totality of implicit terms and conditions is so brutal that it even restricts who an employee can and cannot talk to (or let’s say express his opinions freely to) and I say that in spite of factoring in the open door culture! Imagine an employee talking to the customer’s Vice president while he is only authorized to talk to the operations manager…Work is also a binding contract which simply will not give the employee any opportunity to contribute more than what is asked of him either because the firm does not see the benefit of the marginal reward for the marginal effort of employee or even worse because the firm is afraid of disturbing the sanity of hierarchical structure… Come to think of it, this is the nature of most corporate positions irrespective of whether the person works in McKinsey or Ford and irrespective of whether he is a financial analyst or CEO. Work is that part of life which is defined by a binding contract filled with constraints and it is for good reason that it is that way because firms exist purely in circumstances where free markets fail!
What is life? Ouch, that’s a tough one! In the context of work life balance discussion, let’s just describe life as (supposed to be) not a contractual but voluntary commitment to oneself and other relevant stake holders :) and with more flexibility in terms and conditions. Simply put life must have lesser constraint in comparison to work. Therefore what we real should balance is the time we spend living that part of life which is not driven by us because it has many constraints and is inflexible (i.e. work) and time spent on living the other part which truly allows us to do everything we want to do because it is free of constraints and is flexible.
Unfortunately, life, just like work, has many constraints like the maximum money available which translates into our ability to doing things we want to do and few commitments which although voluntary at the beginning become contractual after a while like family, marriage and kids. So here’s the dilemma… firstly, how to make sure life has little constraints and then once that is achieved how to make sure we balance the time spent in these two different parts… Not an easy equation to crack…
Many strategies exist; either find a job that will give the flexibility to do whatever one wants to do… (I guess successful creative artist partly belong to this category), or find partners and friends who will support one with whatever he or she wants to do. But here’s what is known about the most frequently pursued strategy: slog it out at work (the constrained environment) all your life so that one can earn enough (actually maximum) money which should enable the person to break as many constraints as possible… well… there are no simple answers, but unfortunately balancing work and life is not as simple as maximizing revenue :)
