Work 4 hours a week

Interesting article in the IHT on the book by Timothy Ferriss: (http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/11/12/business/workcol13.php). I think the essence of the book calls for us to drop our tech gadgets, ignore email and start calling people on the phone. This idea is not particularly new except that Ferriss believes that he can reduce the work week to 4 hours by this method (http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/). Working as I do in the land of the 35 hour week (theoretically) it is interesting to see hard working Americans taking an interest in this idea. The 4 hour week is taking it too far but it does remind me that I spend a good part of my day on email. The email questions and answers are not wasted time but in part a symptom of functional and global organisational structures. Global processes, a VP in Seattle, colleagues and functional managers based in WA, Iowa, and Singapore etc require this method of working and time zones make using the telephone difficult. However an alternative would be to specialise by site – live by global rules but manage locally and autonomously. Instantly meetings, travel and conferences would reduce freeing us focus on concrete tasks such as product development, sales, marketing and production. This would lead to increases in efficiency. There is a trend in global organisations to move away from global, functional, headquarter based structures to transnational structures with local autonomy. This ‘centres of excellence’ model has recognised advantages - one of which is to reduce dependence on email to get things done.