Last week, the Ardent Partners analyst team traveled to the Mecca of Country Music, Nashville, Tennessee for the Institute for Supply Management’s 103rd annual conference. This year’s lineup of speakers was top notch, with each uniquely exemplifying ISM 2018’s theme of “Global Vision – Peak Performance.” Arianna Huffington, renowned author, businesswoman, sleep evangelist, and former President and Editor-in-Chief of The Huffington Post, kicked off her Day 1 keynote address with an appeal to the audience of supply management leaders, practitioners, and solution providers.
“You are at the forefront, the center of a revolution of how we do business,” she said. Indeed, the supply management industry is experiencing a wave of digital disruption, picking up where process automation began two decades ago and continuing on with end-to-end digitization and transformation. But then Ms. Huffington got personal. “Disruption has been at the heart of my life, but so has delusion,” she said, before recalling how, after AOL purchased The Huffington Post and named her President and Editor-in-Chief, she became so burnt out that she fell and broke her cheekbone. After waking up in a pool of her own blood and rushing off to the ER for medical care and a battery of tests, she wondered if “this” — foregoing sleep and rest to chase more success, money, and power — is what success looked like.
It was a life-changing moment for Ms. Huffington. She soon left The Huffington Post, her “child,” and established Thrive Global, a company whose goal is to provide businesses and employees with “science-based ” solutions and strategies to avoid burnout and stress, have healthier relationships with technology, foster employee wellness through a better work-life balance, and actually boost their performance. Although Ms. Huffington was indirectly promoting her business, brand, and book, Thrive, the implications were clear and wholly applicable to not just global supply management and its frenetic, “always on, never off” culture, but business and society more broadly.
Let’s face it — with smart phones, notebooks, Kindles, e-readers, free and fast WiFi, and an overabundance of apps, games, social media, news media, and punditry (thanks, HuffPo…), this isn’t just a business problem, it’s a human problem. And since sourcing and procurement teams are still mostly made up of humans (mostly, for now…jk), Ms. Huffington shared with an audience of more than 3,000 attendees her insights and lessons learned (some the hard way) regarding wellness, work-life balance, and having a healthier relationship with technology.
More Sleep = Better Performance, Better Decisions
Aside from the 1% of the world’s population that needs just four hours of sleep a night, she said, the other 99% need between seven and nine hours of sleep for optimal performance and decision making. A wide body of medical research agrees with her. But today’s always-on, never-off culture makes it difficult to get a good night’s sleep.
This is not a recent problem that can be blamed on the surge of digital technology, although surely it has exacerbated the problem. It seems to have become ingrained in capitalist societies where production is valued and rewarded; the more you produce, the more you earn, typically goes the formula. Mantras like, “work hard-play hard” and “I’ll seep when I’m dead” have pervaded the zeitgeist from before the Industrial Revolution, celebrated since the Greatest Generation, and championed by the Millennial Generation (stereotypes be damned). But the physiology does not add up.
“It just hastens the time when we are dead,” she said, bluntly. Sooner or later, sleep deprivation catches up with us. Recent research has shown that consistently failing to get between seven and nine hours of sleep has grave consequences. Poor sleep is associated with a higher risk of developing cancer, cardiovascular conditions and diseases, dementia, anxiety and depression, diabetes, and even sleep apnea, among other health conditions. Chronic sleep deprivation can also lower life expectancy in the same way that even moderate drinking and smoking can.
Poor sleep has marked negative effects on human cognition, memory development and retention, reflexes, responses to stress, our creativity, empathy, and mental health. Ms. Huffington is living proof. “When I’m tired, I’m not my best version of myself. I’m less empathetic and creative,” she said, adding that she’s “more reactive” and makes more mistakes on a poor night’s sleep. She attributes “every bad hiring decision” she’s made to being tired when she made them. Former President Bill Clinton has similarly copped to making poor decisions on poor sleep (although, according to Ms. Huffington, he did not specify which decisions). And Jeff Bezos, founder, chairman, and CEO of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, estimates that when he gets less than six hours of sleep, his decisions are between five and twenty percent less optimal.
It’s not just the immediate and long-term effects of sleep deprivation; sustained deprivation can lead to worker burnout, which has measurable business impact. According to Ms. Huffington, burnout drives down employee engagement: 87% of employees admit that they are not fully engaged, which, according to a RAND study, costs the US economy an estimated $411 billion a year. Burnout also drives up employee attrition (30%). Apart from being bad for workers, burnout is bad for business.
Sleep is but one part of the wellness equation, Ms. Huffington said; nutrition and movement are also critical. “Performance on the field improves when athletes take care of themselves,” she said. And she’s right. Current and former athletes’ pre-game rituals typically consist of eating a nutritious dinner that will power them the next day and getting a good night’s rest. This is on top of many years of regular exercise and fitness, building their bodies, strength, and agility to perform and compete at the top of their game. Neglecting self care, even for one night, can handicap a player even before they take the field. The same is true for the average worker.
Technology: A Blessing and a Curse
Although business practitioners and leaders rely heavily on modern technologies, like process automation, cloud, and mobile solutions, these technologies have been adversely affecting users. “We’re all becoming distracted and slightly addicted to technology and social media,” Ms. Huffington said. “Learning to manage our relationship with our phone is going to be key,” she added, before noting the irony of how the next big disruptive technology may be tools that (temporarily) disconnect us from technology and return us to simpler, analog times when smart conversations and dumb phones were the norm.
Ms. Huffington is leading by example. At Thrive Global, they have built Thriver, an app that shuts people out of their various devices, applications, and games during certain windows (like dinner time), or after established limits (say, eight o’clock at night). The app sends bidirectional messages to inform the user and other people that the user is in Thrive mode and will return their call, email, or text later.
And “we need to stop sleeping with our phones,” she said, adding that “it’s not just about the effects of blue lights – it’s so much more than that.” Mobile devices are compact, digital repositories for all our problems, solutions, and worries. Taking phones to bed effectively allows the work day to continue into the night, a time for restorative sleep. It is too easy to roll over to check email “one more time,” or to scan news feeds for more juicy political news. “We need to pick an arbitrary end of the work day, turn our phones off, and escort them out of our bedroom,” she said to a rousing applause. “We need to ruthlessly prioritize and get comfortable and confident with incomplete projects.”
And, waking up to phones starts the day all wrong. Checking emails half awake in bed, especially stressful emails, sends cortisol, a stress hormone, coursing through our bodies. It can throw us off balance for the rest of the day. Rather than expose ourselves to that kind of stress, it’d be better to ease into the day before diving back in.
Getting the Culture Right and Making the Right Decisions
Switching gears a bit, Ms. Huffington applauded the number of breakout sessions on risk management – a recognition that business in general and supply management in particular are headed into uncharted waters. “Leadership is about seeing the icebergs before they hit the Titanic,” she said. Chief Procurement Officers and their equivalents would do well to understand their biases, past failings, and pledge to “be better” moving forward. Ms. Huffington, who also serves on Uber’s board of directors, referenced the rash of recent sexual assaults by Uber drivers, and “promised that moving forward, no brilliant jerks would be allowed at Uber.”
On that note, Ms. Huffington mentioned Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, who believes that we need to move from IQ (the Intelligence Quotient) and EQ (the Emotional Quotient) to LQ – the “Love Quotient”. We need to change how we treat each other, especially as our lives become increasingly digital and empathy wanes. In fact, as algorithms, artificial intelligence, and machine learning rise, it is even more vital for knowledge workers to retain creativity and empathy, because these are human traits that cannot be displayed (or displaced) by automated, cognitive technologies.
Final Thoughts
Ms. Huffington closed her speech with a Q&A formatted discussion with ISM’s CEO, Tom Derry. The two talked about resilience — about how people can handle a rough night or two, but it cannot become the norm. “People can handle the exceptional; it’s the regular that leads to burnout.” In the meantime, we ought to consider taking some deep breaths, counting to ten, and focusing more on being present in our professional and personal lives. “As a leader, the only way to build empathy is to give someone your undivided attention.” And in today’s environment, “our attention span is less than a goldfish,” she said. We need to stop scrolling through our Twitter feeds, stop arguing politics on Facebook, and reconnect with people on a human level, not just a digital one. We can do better, and we can be better.
Post Script: The irony of writing this article well past this author’s bedtime is not lost on him or his lovely wife. He like many others is still working on ruthless prioritization.
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