Dan Morrell: What does "work-life balance" mean in today's post-pandemic world? Associate editor Julia Hanna asks this year's five recipients of HBS's Alumni Achievement Award to describe how they think about that question.

Reshma Kewalramani: My tips for harmony: Do things every day that make your heart sing. Take random Wednesdays off. I go to Target, I go to the bank, I go to get my nails done. And it is super fun. Random Wednesdays are key.

DM: The answers—from bubble baths to drinking olive oil to never really switching off—reflect a very personal perspective on what that word "balance" means, with some rejecting the concept outright. Also included? Some very practical tips and insights for anyone juggling a full schedule of commitments at work, home, and everywhere in between.

Photos by Susan Young

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Julia Hanna: In addition to serving as COO and treasurer of the Ford Foundation, Depelsha Thomas McGruder (MBA 1998) started the nonprofit advocacy group, Moms of Black Boys United, after the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in 2016. McGruder's husband, David, died in 2020 after suffering a stroke; a solo parent to two sons, 11 and 14 years old, she takes a very centered, practical approach to managing her time.

Depelsha Thomas McGruder: I would say my top three tips for living a balanced life. Well, one thing I said very recently that I'll say here is, number one, I only commit to the things I'm committed to. So, what I mean by that, like I literally did a vision board at the beginning of this year, and I saw that I have 10 commitments that I made: my job, six boards, and three organizations. When those things rise up and there's something any of them ask me to do, it becomes a priority. Everything outside of that, I feel completely liberated to say no to. So that's number one.

Number two, which goes along with that, is "No" is a complete sentence. Now that I've decided what I'm going to be committed to, everything else I feel completely, you know, comfortable saying no to, and I don't have to explain why. Right? And that's fine.

The third thing I would say is seek joy. For me, bubble baths, that's my tip.

I take regular bubble baths, so you know, I have a busy life and I'm doing all these things and that's my way. It's one of the only ways I can, one, escape my kids. Like I close and lock the door in the bathroom and just take a bubble bath, read, and listen to music. But whatever that thing is for you, seek joy and make space for it.

JH: Born in Athens, Antonis Samaras (MBA 1976) served as prime minister of Greece from 2012 to 2015 and has represented his ancestral home of Messinia in parliament for 14 terms and counting. Here he offers a holistic, very Hellenic view of what balance looks like for someone who has persevered through the inevitable ups and downs of over four decades in politics.

Antonis Samaras: Well, I'll tell you the first thing is that you have to have a clear mind and have energy inside you. I was taught since I was a kid that I have to drink a little bit of olive oil in the morning when I wake up, and I always do. And that gives me energy, certainly. But the important thing is to be your own self—what Shakespeare said, and this above all: to thine own self be true.

For instance, when I was a prime minister, I always had my mobile with me. And I never changed my number. And then you could see that people who would have called you, you know, reasonably five times a day or two times a day or two times a week, would not be calling you because they respected you. But whenever the phone rang, you knew it was important, so, therefore, you had to be there. If all of a sudden, things that you used to do, you don't do anymore because you're on a different level, that's very bad. That's a very important tip. You know, stay who you are. Don't care about the position, be your own self. If this is number two and olive oil, number one, number three I would say would be to have a balanced life with your family. I know many people who, because of politics, never really cared as they should have cared about their kids and about their wives. And that always creates a problem. So even if you have five minutes, you've got to call them up and say, you know, I love you. And say, here I am where I'm thinking of you. That's very important. If you don't do it, then all of a sudden you will feel something is missing.

To me, a balanced person is someone who, I put it in ancient Greek terms, who is an Apollo, but at the same time, Dionysus. In other words, you have to be super logical like god Apollo and know exactly what the rationale is for everything you're doing, but at the same time, you have to be a bit sentimental. So, if you have to balance the two, you're doing the right thing. Now, if you're in politics and you're making a decision, it obviously has to do with Apollo. But if you are with your family and your kids and your friends and you go out at night and whatever, you have to be more with Dionysus. So that's the way I always try to balance things.

JH: Ray McGuire (JD/MBA 1984) and his two brothers were raised by his grandparents and a single mother in Dayton, Ohio. Faith, family, and education were the building blocks of a decades-long career on Wall Street that has seen McGuire advise on transactions valued at over $750 billion. The former vice chairman of Citigroup, he recently joined Lazard as president—and continues to draw on the foundational values that have shaped him, with an eye to paying it forward to future generations.

Ray McGuire: There's a lot of narrative today about work-life balance, and in large part because we've all gone through this pandemic. The rules of engagement are you have to perform. In order to do that, your family life has to be strong, right? So, taking care of family, putting family first, it's got to be the highest priority in order to achieve any balance, in order to have any kind of success. So, I would say the foundation's got to be at home, take care of home first. And then when you leave home and you get to the office, then make certain that you do that with a will to win. Continuing to perform or achieve a level of excellence, and then you have to find ways to while doing that, celebrate others.

I mean, isn't this about service? Isn't legacy about how well we served? I think at least it's a component of it. And so, when the final chapter is written, I think it's important, perhaps, for some to count the dollars. I count the impact: the number of mentees, the number of those whom I've been able to sponsor, whose lives I've been able to impact in a way that put them on the right trajectory.

JH: As CEO and president of Boston-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Reshma Kewalramani (GMP 18, 2015) leads a global team of some 4,800 people developing potentially life-changing treatments. She offers a new way of thinking about the concept of work-life balance and shares the approach she and her husband have taken to managing a dual-career household.

Reshma Kewalramani: So, you know, I don't love the words work-life balance, because to me it implies if you put some weight on one side of the scale, you have to take off some weight from the other side of the scale. I prefer work-life harmony. I think that you have to find ways to not believe that because you are doing one thing you cannot do the other thing. I simply don't believe in an OR world. I live in an and and both world.

My tips for harmony: Do things every day that make your heart sing. Take random Wednesdays off. I go to Target, I go to the bank, I go to get my nails done. And it is super fun. Random Wednesdays are key. And marry well. Whoever you end up spending your life with, your life partner has an incredible impact on your day-to-day existence and your long-term existence. And I married really well.

I would say that a few very specific things that my husband and I do that is incredibly helpful to me. He is very, very comfortable with the fact that sometimes I will leave work early and sometimes he will leave work early. It's not a thing, it's just how we lead lives because he works, and I work. He is exceptionally comfortable, as in beyond belief comfortable, talking about the fact that we do our work, our home work, jointly. It's not a thing of embarrassment. It's not a thing that he tolerates. It's a thing of mutual respect, and that makes all the difference in the world. And thirdly, he talks about this with our boys. Our children don't think this is abnormal. There are many, many, baseball games, soccer games, violin concerts, piano concerts, football games, you name it—that I'm not at. But they've never felt that there's something abnormal about it, that their mom is not there. But between their mom and their dad or their grandparents or aunts and uncles or dear friends, somebody from the village is there and that is what's important.

JH: Stephen Schwarzman (MBA 1972) is chairman, CEO, and co-founder of Blackstone, the world's largest alternative asset manager with $991 billion in assets under management. He majored in culture and behavior at Yale and has spent a lifetime reading the zeitgeist, questioning the status quo, and taking a counterintuitive approach to decision-making, often with dramatic results. Not surprisingly, he doesn't understand the term "work-life balance" in the usual sense of those words.

Stephen Schwarzman: Well, I don't know how balanced my life is. My life is intense, and I find that amusing. For me, that's relaxing. And so, that's kind of balance of a certain type. I love hearing about new things, reading about things. And I realize now, as sort of I've vaguely transited into being an adult (it's been a long journey; I still think I'm in my late thirties) but I realize that I enjoy identifying new patterns of what's going on and coming to a conclusion on that. And once I find something that's changed, then I like starting something or changing whatever it is, and then sprinting to create something with it. And so that keeps me perpetually alert because I'm accumulating, in effect, a database on virtually everything I see and hear and, I'm always looking for a discordant fact.

What I find is most people love doing what they're doing, if it's working. And they mostly assume it will always work. I assume it will never always work because my experience has shown that when some group of people discovers somebody else doing something that works, they'll enter that. They'll bring capital or they'll bring people, some type of resources, and mostly squeeze the margin out of it. And so, you need to always be doing new things. And then that's where the fun is. That's where the margin is. That's where the creativity is. That's where you can galvanize, you know, and excite other people to join that journey. And so, I realize now, analyzing after the fact, that that's what I like doing.

So, if you're mentally alive and curious, then I don't worry about work-life balance. I have not understood that concept in a conventional sense. I mean, I like having a nice life and I'm not always switched on, but my brain is always switched on and observing things with intensity, or hearing things in a nuanced way, and realizing you're doing it is very amusing.

This episode of Skydeck was edited by Jocelyn Gonzalez from PRX Productions with assistance from Craig McDonald at HBS. It is available wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

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