The CEO recently informed employees that further blurring the line between work and life is the recipe for success and is pushing for staff to put in more overtime, according to an email Shah wrote to his employees, which was obtained by Business Insider last week.
“Working long hours, being responsive, blending work and life, is not anything to shy away from,” he wrote in the email. “There is not a lot of history of laziness being rewarded with success. Hard work is an essential ingredient in any recipe for success.”
Shah informed staff that this is a change that will be pushed for in the “weeks and months to come,” citing that the most successful people he knows follow this work culture.
“Everyone deserves to have a great personal life – everyone manages that in their own way – ambitious people find ways to blend and balance the two. I think that is what we all should do,” he wrote.
He is also encouraging staff to be “aggressive, pragmatic, frugal, agile, customer oriented, and smart” and to be more careful with spending company money going forward.
“I would also encourage you to think of any company money you spend as your own. Would you spend money on that, would you spend that much money for that thing, does that price seem reasonable, and lastly – have you negotiated the price? Everything is negotiable and so if you haven’t then you should start there,” he wrote.
He could have made it much shorter: “If you’re not already looking for another job, start NOW.”
I’ll paraphrase it a little more clearly:
“To all my best workers that have the highest skills and therefor the most job mobility: Now is the time for you to exit to a better organization leaving behind those that don’t have the same options, opportunity, or ambition you do. While we’ll not notice your departure for a few months because of inertia of the good systems you’ve put in place, rest assured when things start breaking or getting lost and we have no one left who knows how to solve these problems we’ll scratch our heads how this all came to be while you’re gainfully employed at a better organization with more pay and benefits not thinking about us at all.”