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Conversation with Susie Orman Schnall on Work/Life Balance: The Balance Project

ZP0PO6mzWorking Capital Conversations: Leading thinkers, practitioners and experts discuss the ideas that drive global business.

The challenge of work/life balance continues confound. Employees insist they want it. Many companies – through flex schedules, job shares, training and more – try to offer it. And yet, so many of us – men and women – feel like we’re just not doing it right.

To make it worse, we then combine that frustration with the ideal that we can – or at least should – have it all. We think we see the alleged examples parading in front of us every day – the so-called superstars who hold down high-powered jobs, work out constantly, volunteer incessantly, love their spouses and kids, and surely in their free time, compose music like Mozart, paint like Monet and cook like Julia Child. You know who they are. We come to believe that to reach that next level – perhaps even to have it all – we only need to lean in a bit harder.

516F5+G14JL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_So why doesn’t it happen? Why aren’t we all walking around feeling like we have it all?

Award-winning writer Susie Orman Schnall wanted to find out. So she did the obvious thing: She asked. In a series of interviews with powerful, accomplished, seemingly have-it-all women, she asked their secrets to having it all. And the answers – what these women acknowledged – just might surprise you.

The interview series is called, quite appropriately, The Balance Project, which you can find at susieschnall.com. And now it’s transformed as well into Schnall’s second novel, an engaging, funny and often uncomfortably accurate read called “The Balance Project: A Novel.”

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