So an agile team strives to work at a sutainable pace.

Great.

It’s even in the agile manifesto -well, on the second page:
“Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.“

But what about the managers? and the executive layer?

According to a new book, Elsewhere USA (Dalton Conley), things have dramatically changed in the past few decades:

• In the 60s, professional success translated into increased wealth and more leisure time for people and their family
• Today, professional success doesn’t. Instead, people end up working more hours and feel higher  anxiety

Excerpt from the book description:

Boundaries between leisure and work, public space and private space, and home and office have blurred and become permeable. How many of us now work from home, our wireless economy allowing and encouraging us to work 24/7? How many of us talk to our children while scrolling through e-mails on our BlackBerrys? How many of us feel overextended, as we are challenged to play multiple roles–worker, boss, parent, spouse, friend, and client–all in the same instant?

Conley shows that the higher the position, the more people feel their work is intangible, pushing them to work longer and longer hours, everywhere, all the time. He doesn’t condemned the practice, but rather tell people to accept and live with it.

So here’s a question:

Given that

• employees do what the boss does -a simple mimic mechanism or a conscious action to avoid being in trouble
• over utilized people produce less than people that have some
• all systemic conflicts are the result of unexamined assumptions (root causes)
• overall throughput can be only be increased by increasing the throughput at the bottleneck process

Are executives really helping their company when working 24/7?