A Sponsored Initiative

The Role of Senior Business Leaders in Creating and Sustaining Work/Life Change

1999 / Location: The Wharton School

Sponsors

Allied Signal
American Express
Booz Allen & Hamilton
Ernst & Young
SAS Institute
Seagate Technology
Caliburn Partnerships
The Sloan Foundation

This conference focused on how senior executives can create work environments that encourage and enable employees’ integration of work and personal lives by modeling not balance, in the traditional sense of equal involvement in various life domains, but, rather, authenticity – the alignment of one’s actions and values.   This was a main theme of the research that took participants into the field, working in teams, to study the best practices of exemplary senior executives.

Based on the knowledge generated in this conference, Stew Friedman and Sharon Lobel published The Happy Workaholic: a role model for employees in the Academy of Management Executive.

Also, based on the field research for this conference four case studies were published in the International Journal of Leadership Education. These cases were listed on the Aspen Institute’s case materials Web site and have been conveyed to hundreds of educators, students, and researchers from around the world.

Participants

Debbie Hufnagel, Project Manager  Work/Life Integration Project / Organizer
Stew Friedman,  Ford Motor / Organizer

Ellen Bankert, Center on Work & Family
Alice Campbell, Baxter Healthcare
Michelle Carpenter, Aetna Life
Perry Christensen, Merck (now Smith and Nephew)
Jessica DeGroot, Independent Consultant (now Third Path)
Sue Eklund, Seagate Technology
Doug Frenkel, University of Pennsylvania
Les Hamashima, SAS Institute
Susan Hofman, Allied Signal
Deborah Holmes, Ernst & Young
Vivian Jarcho, United States Department of Justice, Workforce Relations
Sharon Klun, American Express Financial Advisors
Ellen Ernst Kossek, Michigan State University (now Purdue)
Marilyn Kraut, University of Pennsylvania
Candace Lange, Eli Lily
Mary Dean Lee, McGill University
Kathie Lingle, KPMG
Sharon Lobel, Seattle University
Dennis Marcel, Ernst & Young
Patrick McLaurin, Booz Allen & Hamilton
Frances Milliken, New York University
Simon Mordant, Caliburn Partnership
Leslie Perlow, University of Michigan (now Harvard)
David Russo, SAS Institute
Phyllis Siegel, Rutgers University
Cynthia Thompson, Baruch College, SUNY
Anne Wenzel, Independent Consultant
John Weyandt, Seagate Technology
Lloyd Wilky, Allied Signal
Esther Williams, Seagate Technology
Faith Wohl, Child Care Action Campaign