In my experience it's not the travel, per se, even though the jet lag can be killer. It means being On 100% of the time you're away. The raw number of hours of being Always On for your company--around the world, with different people in different contexts--creates an emotional distance to one's family, because your mental world becomes intensely focused and 100% only on work, and work issues. Product issues, team, management, all that you can balance, but being on the road is the chaos of (enterprise) customers. They may love you, but they're needy. And all the time you're together, you're considering every word, and interaction to drive to a preferred outcome. It's never a "dinner". It's part of a never-ending orchestration to achieve specific outcomes.
Coming off of /those/ trips, he should have re-engaged with his family, but the challenge is the trips exhaust your mental and (jet lag) physical energy. Re-engaging with family means another "on" time, but it also means the expensive context switch from being able to talk business any time any where, in any state--leaving that mental zone-- to talk about family issues.
No, I don't get the sense he meant only engineers should work hard and CEOs should play with their kids.
I think the message is CEO's should consider forcing family-life onto their schedule, instead of being 100% consumed by work.
Yes, there are other pressing issues, and you might not be able to predict the value, but Scott says take it from someone who has gone though the struggle--it pays dividends at home, and at work.
I can relate.
PS-- I'm on the road every Mon thru Thursday and pretty much live in a hotel. I didn't relate to this pierce. It's. Rey possible, then, I don't have the skills to be a CEO.
But, I have a solution for these as well... Give some of the responsibility to your co-founders means they can take the final decision in that particular area. Through that, CEO can save himself from lot of stress and also can make some time to share with his family...
Exactly. The culture should be 'everybody else' works 80 hours a week and dealts with a nasty commute? But the CEO, lives a couple blocks away and blocks out time here and there to play with his kids...? Ok, There is certainly nothing wrong with this advice for CEOs, but the question goes begging as to wether or not such a "game theoretic" outcome is stable if the strategy is pursued by a broader set of employees. One clue, of course, is in the original story...where work/life balance is a "value" to the company...and the c-level execs are all washing their cars and feeding them pizza...while the engineering team they slave away...on the weekends in the cubicle farm...missing kids ball-games and family meals...etc. WTF. That's one heck of an 'omission' from the problems that face the CEO. And in one sense it is also incredibly narcissistic (literal sense), to be "fixing" your own problems but not those of your team at work. It's so bizzarre I'm not sure I didn't mis-understand something? It seems a glaring error in the essay not to reconcile this part of the plotline. I do give him credit for having at least woven part of it into the story, however.