In Praise of Non-workaholics

A Primer on Management Technique

September 2007 By Denny Hatch

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One of the most shadowy, behind-the-scenes characters of recent history was a sixth cousin of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a plain little spinster lady named Margaret (Daisy) Suckley (rhymes with “book-lee”), whose Hudson River mansion is being renovated.

Suckley died in 1991 in her 100th year. For years she maintained she had nothing to add to what had been written about Roosevelt and his presidency. But when her house was cleaned out, a suitcase of letters was found under her bed, and to the astonishment of historians and family members, Suckley and Roosevelt had a long-term and very close relationship. Although the words are veiled in the mists of time, something magical seems to have happened between them—some kind of Monica Lewinsky moment that changed the dynamics of their interaction.

The story is told in an extraordinary book, “CLOSEST COMPANION: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley,” edited and annotated by Geoffrey C. Ward—alas, now out of print. (Amazon.com has one copy available for $98.)

What is interesting is how much light she shed on how Roosevelt relaxed during the 12 years of his presidency. He made for himself a life completely separate from the burdens of office—virtually impossible in this era of e-mail, BlackBerrys and instant satellite communications that can turn a person into a workaholic.

Being a workaholic does not guarantee success.

Some Current Workaholics
In the course of my daily vacuuming of the media for stories of people and events, I came across a number of workaholics—guys who were so consumed with their careers that they virtually had no other life. Among them:

* Frank Perdue, chicken mogul. “In building his poultry business, Perdue was the consummate entrepreneur and workaholic, who would put in 18 hours a day and get by on three or four hours’ sleep,” said the Associated Press obituary writer in April 2005. “He had a cot in his office and often spent the night there, even though his home was 50 yards away.”

* Robert Nardelli, former CEO of The Home Depot and recently appointed CEO of Chrysler. New York Times writers Julie Creswell and Michael Barbaro called him “an obsessive workaholic who rose at 4 a.m., logged 14-hour days and routinely worked through the weekend, splitting his time between Home Depot’s headquarters in Atlanta and shuttling from store-to-store in a chauffeured black Chevy Suburban.”

* Drew Rosenhaus, agent for professional athletes who with two partners handles the careers of 91 players. When asked how three men handle 91 players, Rosenhaus explained, “I literally work seven days a week, I’m not married, I have no kids, I don’t take vacations.” When the great wide receiver Terrell Owens got it in his head that he wanted more money from the Philadelphia Eagles in mid-season, Rosenhaus totally botched the negotiations, and the Eagles’s management fired Owens, who missed a goodly portion of the 2005 season.

* Chuck Prince, CEO of Citigroup, who a former associate described as “a workaholic whose answer to every problem is just to put in more hours.” Prince told a questioner at NYU’s Stern Business School, “I have spent my entire life as a workaholic. It really destroyed my first marriage ... It is a 24-hour day, seven-day a week job that I have and that the people who report to me have.”

* Thomas Charlton, former CEO of Tidal Software, a systems-management software company in Mountain View, Calif., was described by Susan Hansen in the November 2002 issue of Inc. thusly:

From the start, Charlton made it clear that he wouldn’t be working overtime alone. All remaining staffers were expected to take on work outside their job descriptions while the company scrambled to rebuild. Late-night Tuesdays and Thursdays were mandatory. Twelve-to-fourteen-hour days became the norm. Employees often came in as early as 6 a.m. and routinely worked weekends. The pace hasn’t slowed much since then, even though a full management team and staff are now in place. Charlton, who has been known to bring his cell phone with him to the bathroom, still has a penchant for setting up 6 a.m. conference calls with Tidal sales managers and for riding everybody else hard. “The treadmill is running a helluva lot faster now,” he declared at a training session for Tidal managers early this year. “If someone isn’t working hard enough, they’re not committed.”

These men were only running companies, for pity’s sake!

Franklin Roosevelt, a cripple, and General George C. Marshall, one of history’s greatest executives and geopolitical strategists, took on the major challenge of the 20th century—World War II—and did it successfully without being workaholics.

Franklin Roosevelt’s Private Life
In 1918, Roosevelt’s marriage to Eleanor collapsed, when she discovered a cache of love letters to him from her social secretary, Lucy Mercer. Divorce was avoided only when Roosevelt promised never to see Mercer again and agreed to never again share a bed with Eleanor. Eleanor Roosevelt went on to lead a peripatetic life of her own, one of constant travel, writing and good works. During Roosevelt’s presidency, she traveled incessantly and was his eyes and ears, taking in the events and people across the country and around the world.

In 1921, Roosevelt contracted polio at age 39 and was completely paralyzed from the waist down. In 1932, he had been governor of New York for four years and was elected president for the first time.

As an administrator, Roosevelt was unique. His presidency was the longest and most action-packed in history, as he was forced to deal with the Great Depression, followed by World War II, a conflict that spanned the entire globe. He kept a great deal in his head and shared different pieces of the puzzle with different people. In contrast to this era where the White House is glutted with hundreds of committees, agencies, aides, staffers, secretaries, gophers and hangers-on, Roosevelt operated with a minimum of people, and no one person knew everything the president knew.

With Eleanor constantly on the road, Roosevelt’s social life revolved around three women, his secretary, Marguerite (“Missy”) LeHand, and his cousins, Laura Delano and Daisy Suckley. They frequently were joined by Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s brilliant advisor, who lived at the White House.

For relaxation, Roosevelt could not do the normal guy things, such as tennis or golf. He had a specially built car with hand controls he could drive around his estate in Hyde Park, N.Y. His other outlets were physical therapy at the Little White House at the spa in Warm Springs, Ga., working on his stamp collection and designing Top Cottage, a small house built on his Hyde Park property as a getaway for himself and Daisy.

Roosevelt was good at mixing martinis, and every evening after work he would bartend for his circle of family and friends prior to dinner. For relaxation in off hours—whether at the White House, the Little White House, Shangri-La (later Camp David) or Hyde Park—he hosted a perpetual party where intimate banter took his mind off the momentous events that had enveloped the country and the world.

General George C. Marshall
Unlike most of the general officers who reported to him, Marshall did not have a West Point ring. He was a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute who advanced up the chain of command to become Army chief of staff and Roosevelt’s closest advisor (along with Hopkins). Although he desperately wanted to command the invasion of Europe, Roosevelt said to him, “I couldn’t sleep nights, George, if you were out of Washington.”

Recently I read the 1982 biography by Leonard Mosley, “Marshall: Hero for Our Times.” It is worth quoting at length because the words that follow can serve as a brief whitepaper on how a person can manage a vast enterprise and still maintain some semblance of sanity. First, Marshall’s typical schedule:

Considering the burdens of his day, Marshall kept extraordinarily fit and unruffled. Except when he was traveling, he never went late to bed, and he saw his wife, Katherine, at least for an evening meal, which she had waiting for him when he got home. His day began at 6:00 A.M. when he went down to feed the chickens which he raised in the run behind Quarters One at Fort Myer—they provided eggs for the house—after which he rode along the Potomac bridle path and through Arlington Cemetery, sometimes accompanied by his stepdaughter, Molly Winn, or by his goddaughter, Rose Page, if either happened to be staying in the house. Then he came back to a breakfast cooked by Staff Sergeant William Farr, who had once worked in the kitchens of a hotel in Savannah, Georgia. During this time he glanced through the first of the nine newspapers he read every morning. At one time he had been driven around by a single orderly, Sergeant James W. Powder, but when the Army began to recruit women for the services, he added a WAC driver, Sergeant Marjorie Payne, the pretty blond daughter of a Michigan truck driver, who had once worked as a cosmetician and never looked ruffled. She delivered him to the office by seven forty-five each morning and brought him home at five-thirty each afternoon. In between, he read reports, wrote memorandums, heard briefings, received visitors, testified before Congress, went to see the President, and made the big decisions that affected the direction of the war. He was constantly scribbling comments or instructions in pencil on the edge of office memorandums. He wrote in his own hand most of the papers which the President subsequently read to Congress about the progress of the war. He had three competent women secretaries to screen the visitors who streamed into his office, and control the flow of paper across his desk, and see to it that not a note or a letter was left to be answered at the end of the day. “He had a fetish for a clean desk,” said one of them, Mona Nason. “He liked it cleared up by five every afternoon.”

How did Marshall—sans cell phone, sans Internet, sans BlackBerry—keep current with fast-changing events all over the world?

It was easy for anyone visiting the Pentagon to understand why the President had decided he couldn’t do without General Marshall. It was unlikely that any other man could have handled all the demands which the Chief of Staff’s office now made upon its holder. In size, in complexity, in the gravity and complication of its daily problems, it had grown astonishingly since Marshall had first taken over in 1939. There were 3,000 officers and men now working directly for him, keeping him in hourly touch with how the war was going, how the Allies were feeling, what the enemy was planning, what the President was thinking, how Congress would vote.

Marshall had always been a dedicated delegator of duties, who believed in picking the best man or woman for a job and then letting him or her get on with it. If those subordinates were good, he occasionally rewarded them with a grunt of appreciation. If they failed, he would throw them out without a moment’s hesitation. But the astounding thing was that he kept in touch with every operation his delegates were overseeing. He made it his daily duty to know everything they knew—hence his dictum that any one on his staff, but anyone, could walk right into his office if he had anything to tell him.

He suffered fools badly and couldn’t stand people who came before him and stuttered or postured and didn’t get to the point. But he listened. He listened to everything that was told him, and his sure control of all the activities reported to his department from an obscure raid on an island outpost in the Marianas to the latest report from the Ultra intercepts enabled him to keep a heavy, palpitating, often frenetically busy organization under smooth, efficient control.

Finally, the crown jewel of Marshall’s management technique, the daily briefing:

It was these bright young men who organized the briefing sessions at Marshall’s headquarters which became his pride and joy and the envy of American and Allied commanders at headquarters throughout the world. Every morning authorized personnel could walk into Marshall’s conference room and get a graphic—yet accurate—picture of exactly what was happening in every operational zone in which the United States was involved. It began promptly at 9:00 A.M.

“We had gradually,” Marshall recalled later, “gotten to a point where the presentation of the world picture was of great importance to me and the principal staff—because we had so many different theaters operating at once and along with that the stormy time with things at home. We had available artists of some talent and plenty of them, so we gradually formed the morning show on the basis of presentation by young men who were chosen for their ability to speak in an attractive manner. They got up at four o’clock in the morning and worked on the cables of the night before—and were ready for the presentation at nine o’clock.”

The charts had been set up five minutes before, the team bustling around Marshall’s desk no matter how hard he was working or whom he was seeing. “It just went off like a theatrical thing,” he said. “They became very expert at it, and it was really a thrilling presentation. You saw the whole war up to the last minute—done in such a way that it was easy, in a sense, to comprehend.”

When, later on, Marshall went to a briefing at Eisenhower’s headquarters in London, he was appalled at the ham-handed way in which it was handled and ordered General Walter Bedell Smith, who was in charge, back to Washington “to see how it really should be done.”

George C. Marshall was called out of retirement by President Truman to become secretary of state. It was Marshall who saved war-ravaged Europe with his concept of the European Recovery Plan (later known as the Marshall Plan). He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.

George C. Marshall died in 1959 in his 80th year and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery with his first wife, Elizabeth Carter Coles, her mother, Elizabeth Pendleton Coles, and his second wife, Katherine Tupper Brown Marshall.

If a reader can name two more influential 20th century Americans than Roosevelt and Marshall, the floor is open for your comments.