Question

It’s a bright Tuesday morning, and you’re sitting in a rather exciting meeting in which your company’s marketing team will present the new fall campaign. It’s been an exciting time since you took over as CEO of this small electronics firm, and everyone is anticipating that the new product lineup that the company has been working on will bring new levels of success.
Just as the team is about to start presenting their thoughts on how to market the new products, your phone rings; it’s Karen from distribution, asking whether you have five minutes to talk about truck maintenance. “No,” you tell her, “I’m in a meeting.” As you apologize for the interruption, your phone rings again; it’s your assistant, and he wants to know when you can schedule a meeting with the president of a subcontractor. A few minutes after that, Gary from HR calls and asks when the new benefits package will be approved. After that you get calls from the mailroom, the president of the electricians’ union, your chief accountant, and your teenage son, asking whether he can drive the car to school. And in between all of those calls, your phone has been buzzing nonstop with emails.
With all of these interruptions, a presentation that should have taken 30 minutes took more than two hours, and this isn’t the first time something like this has happened either. Day and night, it seems, you’re getting bombarded by phone calls and text messages and emails, almost to the point that you can’t get any real work done. As you trudge back to your office, you remark to your assistant, “Maybe I should just get rid of this phone.” And he says, “Maybe you should.”
He mentions that he just saw a magazine article about executives who don’t use cell phones, even high-powered people like Warren Buffett, Mikhail Prokhorov (owner of the NBA team New Jersey Nets), and Tavis Smiley, a TV and radio host. One manager quoted in the articles says that he got rid of his cell phone to increase his efficiency. With no cell phone, he could focus on one meeting at a time and give exclusive attention to whomever he is talking with. Tavis Smiley says that without a cell phone, employees of his company actually get more conversation time with him than before.
So maybe this is the solution to your problems: Without a cell phone, there would be no more interrupted meetings, no more urgent calls about stuff that isn’t really urgent, no more 30-minute appointments that stretch to two hours. When you ask your managers and employees, however, there’s a high level of anxiety. Will you be accessible at all? What if there is a real emergency?

Questions

1. Do you believe that the CEO of a company can effectively do his or her job of leading without being always accessible?

2. If you, as the CEO, were to get rid of your phone, how would ensure that lines of communication remain open?

Please write a 500-to-700 paper in APA Style answering all questions, and include at least 3 reputable sources.

Answer 1

Abstract:

Cell Phone- a technology that once was a magical tool to build communication that brought fat away places close has now become liking a rope around our necks. It was not bad when emails were confined to desktop PCs, but now when the smartphones have arrived emails have found the power to penetrate in to the deepest recesses of the day and even night. This has resulted in the lengthening of the working day, even worse for those at authority positions and high pressure jobs as it is always expected that such people can be reached easily by mail and corresponding reply will be speedy. In the old world of desktop PCs, emails could be left behind in offices, which allowed for a switch in and switch off from work, but smartphones like monsters changed all that, emails and calls ( and definitely many more stuff available on phones) are in filtering our leisure time, family time and even sleep time.

Answer 1.

Rosemary Haefner, chief human resources officer at CareerBuilder, in a news release said- “ While we need to be connected to devices for work, we are also a click away from our alluring distractions from our personal lives like social media and various other apps.”

Around 3 years back, Oscar winner film star-Eddie Redmayne swapped his I phone for a simple old fashioned handset. In his words- “it was a reaction against being glued permanently to my I phone during waking hours. The deluge of emails was constant and I found myself trying to keep up in real time, at the expense of living in the moment.”

A former policy adviser and British prime Minister- Steve Hilton is a proud phone free person. He run a Silicon Valley start up but refuses to keep a phone, not even a simple one and there are numerous examples like him and Redmayne.

A CEO of a company can not only effectively work without being always accessible but s/he can work even more effectively as s/he will save a lot of time in being always accessible like the CEO in question above.

Answer 2.

If I am a phone free CEO, the phonelessness does not make me any less. I will rely on my assistant, or if required my office or home’s landline. Moreover not having a phone does not make me cut out of world, I can use my laptop for required hours of the day to check my emails.

The phone anyways if for our convenience, but people on the other hand have made their own phones a mode of convenience for others rather than themselves. So, if people need to reach out to us, let them work a little more hard and wait for a few hours for a reply or response to that important call.

Refernces:

“I Run a Silicon Valley startup- but I refuse to own a cell-phone”- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/11/steve-hilton-silicon-valley-no-cellphone-technology-apps-uber

“Smartphones are making you slack off at work”

http://fortune.com/2016/06/09/smartphones-making-you-slack-at-work-survey/