TWenty years ago the Japanese were going to own us because they all worked 14 hours a day and died at their desks.

Japan is now recovering from a ten year long recession, if memory is correct.

I've worked insane hours in spurts, and after about three weeks the brain withers and dies.

Something worth remembering is that in China and India, business leaders are more likely to have a non working spouse and are likely to have more servants around the house -- drivers, nannies etc. That alone probably means the can spend more time on work.

I'm lazy, but am I representative?

In the 90s I was interviewing European company managers and directors (in electronics industries). They frequently complained that it was impossible to compete with their US counterparts - the US people worked insane hours, had no balance in their lives, ate at their desks, got only a ridiculously short 2-week vacations (and didn't take advantage of them) etcetera. So, 2 points:

1) Stages of growth and culture have a lot to do with management work hours. If you want an 8 week vacation, get a job in Germany; if you want servants driving your children around, move to Singapore. These differences do not correlate directly with productivity

2) How the hell do you measure CEO productivity anyway? Success, ok. you can tie that to stock value or some such. But productivity? By what metric, decisions per hour?

"Americans aren't lazy. We all know people who work a full day and bring work home for evenings and weekends."

We all know people who fit a wide variety of descriptions, including schmoes who do the bare minimum possible to get by without setting off any alarms. I think that the rule of thirds applies here. 1/3 are inherently lazy, 1/3 work hard because it is of their nature, 1/3 do what they need to do.

"But Americans have developed expectations that border on unreasonable: prosperity, leisure, and fulfillment, all at once..."

Why is this unreasonable? We live in the most prosperous country in history, with a strong economy and unlimited opportunity.

"... plus we have a mentality that leads us to believe we're entitled to these things...."

Can't disagree with that part. People want all of the things in the aforementioned quote, but most don't realize that they have to actually work for it and that they may have to forego their Lincoln Navigator with the 26" rims for a few years.

Was there any evidence gathered about how many hours each group actually spent doing business per week?

A lot of "business" in emerging markets is activity that amounts to little more than dodges, skirmishes with, and scheme-creation to hoodwink government bureaucrats and barons. This is often a very significant tax on any manager's time in places like China, India, Russia, Brazil etc., but it can't be said to result from any greater "hunger" to succeed on the part of the manager. It certainly doesn't result in greater productivity; just the opposite.

Another big difference is the efficiency of things like travel, communications and organization. Traffic in Moscow and other boomtown capital cities in the emerging markets is often close to gridlock; it can take nearly an entire afternoon to get to the airport, and where the fight with the bureaucrats begins yet again. Perhaps these CEOs all have helicopters or private jets, but I doubt it. Likewise, business meetings in the emerging markets rarely begin on time and tend to follow the Clintonian model of discipline, not the GE model. More time sunk in non-productive effort demanded by the local business culture.

Of course there are super-CEOs in any culture.A Carlos Slim could outperform any CEO on any continent in any given year, and he probably has many counterparts in India and China. But let's not pretend that emerging market CEOs on average are more productive than their US counterparts. It's like pretending that Iowa farmboys shooting hoops on a frozen field by the barn are necessarily better than their peers playing on asphalt because the farmboys are, uh, "hungrier." Maybe, but that field's still frozen and the local competition's still a lot lamer than in the Bronx.

"In China, India, and Singapore, they're not talking about work-life-balance issues,"

...Yet.

As countries like China and India begin to experience a prosperity that has never been possible before, they will begin to face the kinds of dilemmas we are fortunate enough struggle with.

Jim Dunnigan pointed out 15 years ago that the long hours Japanese businessmen put in were largely make-believe - they put in at most marginally more productive hours than their American counterparts. The rest of the time was spent on things like drinking and playing games while being at their office to demonstrate how hard they were working.

So Japanese hours working were like European crime statistics.

maybe lazy but these two are going to jail...

Enron's Lay, Skilling Found Guilty of Conspiracy and Fraud

The biggest decision any CEO has to make is allocating capital. And those sorts of decisions usually don't take more than half an hour, but most CEO's continue to make really bad decisions like acquiring AOL for $100 billion or investing another $1 billion in X-Box. The higher up you go the less work you have to do. George Bush learned that lesson, except that he decided to invest a $1 trillion in an unnecessary war, which probably took him about half an hour to decide as the decider.

Jim Dunnigan pointed out 15 years ago that the long hours Japanese businessmen put in were largely make-believe - they put in at most marginally more productive hours than their American counterparts. The rest of the time was spent on things like drinking and playing games while being at their office to demonstrate how hard they were working.

Throw in the pursuit of golden canaries (mistresses), and this sounds like the reality behind the hard-working Chinese businessmen described in the article.

Overwork, lack of time, are really just failures to prioritize combined with a desire to work to avoid having to think which is the hardest work of all.

In my experience, Americans don't complain about long hours, they brag about it. Especially in the finance industry in New York. Working long hours there is often treated as a sign of your importance.

I agree, as a medical resident I see the same phemonenon with young Asian and white physicians. The Asian doctors are much more willing to pursue more challenging specialties such as cardiology than the white ones, who are more content doing primary care....

The hours worked by executives is impossible to measure and pointless as an indicator of anything.

You have to first concede to the assumption that CEOs are generally productive in the first place.

The sacred cows of perks and parachutes.

"In China, India, and Singapore, they're not talking about work-life-balance issues," argues David Heenan, author of Flight Capital.

Sorry, but this guy's wrong about Singapore. Work-life balance is actually a huge topic there and the government does a lot to encourage balance. It's odd that he included Singapore as a comparison point with India and China. There is a massive gap between work standards and expectations in Singapore and either of these countries.

I remember my last 6 months before leaving Japan--had ended up heading up two completely separate projects because both were international and they needed someone with the language skills. We were under ridiculous deadlines and undermanned. I would usually work until 9 pm, go home, call the US at 11 PM to posit certain questions, wake up at 5 AM to get the answers, then get ready to go into work. Did this day in day out plus weekends for 6 months. I estimate I was working over 100 hrs a week. (At the end of those 6 months, the main project was done, I quit my job, went home, and collapsed. )

Japan gets around its "Management by Consensus" problems (tendency to drift, never come to a conclusion) by putting arbitrary deadlines in place and then running like crazy to meet them. This unfortunately far too often leads to a combination of Management-by-Rearranging-Deckchairs and Management-by-Crisis.