In "Face
Time," Business Week probes
the irrationality of all of our insecurities about failing
to show sufficient of same—that is to say, our fears
of what will happen if we’re not in the office at all hours. (This
is a two-way street, by the way: Just as junior employees
worry if they don’t demonstrate "enough" face time, managers
worry about employees, no matter how impeccable their performance,
who seem to go missing more than others.) The syndrome
goes like this:
"It’s as though managers say to themselves: “Now
that Fran is in charge of the product launch, the plan should
be in great shape. Fran has a terrific track record and excellent
relationships in the industry. Our weekly one-on-one will
keep me up to date on her progress. She’s also great about
cc:ing me on correspondence with our partners. But hey —
if I can see her in the office every day from 6 a.m. to 8:30
p.m., I’ll feel even better about how her project is going.”
And this is for those lucky schmoes who aren’t even prisoners
of the billable hour. (By the way, the anecdote of the
untouched Chinese food container is a keeper.)
But I have another candidate for what can make us all feel
in a pressure cooker of someone else’s devising at times,
and for better or worse it links directly to the concept
of being a professional: Client expectations.
Living up to, or even exceeding (!), client expectations
is something I hope we all aspire to. Today that can
mean responding by Blackberry within hours, if not minutes.
At the Fordham Law School conference where I spoke 10 days
ago (on challenges to "professionalism" posed by large firm
practice), an off-agenda, spontaneous and heartfelt dialogue
broke out about the nefarious impact of Blackberry’s—albeit
on the premise that there’s no going back. A Cravath
partner said rather wistfully that when he began practicing
and a client posed a question, "one had time to reflect,
to turn it over and around in one’s mind, to probe it." Can
you say, "that’s so yesterday!"
This saddens me. And maybe it doesn’t have to be this
way. We are, after all, collaborators in submitting
to the tyranny of the clock. Although it’s too soon
to know for sure, initial
reports are that the train derailment in Japan that killed
over 90 people yesterday was caused by the motorman speeding
because he was 90 seconds behind schedule. An extreme
case of "clock tyranny," to be sure, but isn’t our reaction
to that story to hold the simultaneous and incompatible views
both that the motorman was crazily irresponsible, and that
we can understand his wanting to be on schedule?
There’s no simple solution to this, of course, but we can
begin, as did Business Week, by pointing out how
irrational it all is.
