I am an organisational behaviour specialist and author of The Activity Illusion. Formerly a corporate man, I have switched careers and was recently awarded a MSc in Occupational Psychology at Birkbeck College. Part of the reason I did this is because I was finding it increasingly hard to find work I could enjoy in corporate life. Everyone I worked with was frantically busy and yet so little was being achieved; this appeared to me to be the case the more senior the manager. I worked with people who were "too busy" to perform the basic functions of leadership - too busy to have team meetings, too busy to delegate, too busy to give feedback.
Some of this is about the nature of 21st century business life in which we have begun to equate busy-ness with status. It also has a lot to do with the technology that enables us to be busy 24/7 such as email and - in particular - devices such as BlackBerry. Something is clearly wrong when we are routinely checking our emails when talking to our children or checking our BlackBerry in the middle of the night. There is a wealth of evidence that this is poor for effectiveness, productivity, stress and a whole range of behaviours - not just as leader but as human being.
