Page 13 - Benjamin Franklin\'s The Way to Wealth: A 52 brilliant ideas interpretation - PDFDrive.com
P. 13
2 BE THE DRIVER, NOT THE DRONE
Despite an overwhelming emphasis on hard work and honest labour
Franklin is very clear about the importance of keeping control of your
work life. Or, as he puts it, ‘drive thy business, let not that it drive thee.’
As a man who packed half a dozen careers into his life, Franklin well
understood the need to manage his tasks so that he remained in control of
his work, rather than the other way around.
DEFINING IDEA…
The way we measure productivity is flawed. People checking their
BlackBerry over dinner is not the measure of productivity.
~ TIMOTHY FERIS, AUTHOR OF THE 4-HOUR WORK WEEK
Go to different parts of the world and you will find some dramatically
different work cultures at play. I once worked for an American technology
company who were simultaneously setting up offices in the UK, Germany
and France. The New Yorker overseeing this launch based himself mainly in
London where he found that his new employees might speak with strange
accents but at least he could understand the way they worked; they rapidly
adopted his pattern of staying at work until deep into the night and
understanding that ‘lunch’ meant a hurriedly-snatched sandwich eaten at the
keyboard. The Germans and the French, on the other hand…Well, the
French insisted fiercely that lunch was not an intake of calories but rather a
venue you went to, and by 5 p.m. the German office only needed a bit of
tumbleweed blowing through to be the model for a Wild West ghost town.
But neither was any less productive. The French did much of their most
important negotiation over lunch and the German approach was that anyone
still in the office after 5 p.m. was clearly a poor time manager who
couldn’t do their job properly.
In the US there is now a backlash against the idea that a good worker is
one who spends all their time in front of their keyboard. One of the
bestselling books is The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss who realised
