I say not-so-revolutionary 'cause the basic idea of "we don't really want life balance", is not new and many authors have loved to be controversial on this. In this case, starting point is that life balance is just a tool to reach what we really want: we want to be happy. Interestingly, the Author compares life balance with diet:
you don’t want to be on a diet; you want to lose weight. We don’t want balance; we want to be happy and have better relationships.
As a result, Author proposes an approach done of Transition Management, Rest and, more or less, meditation. In a word, a do-it-yourself kit. We have been there already: thousand times we have been said that
* reality is reality and will not change;
* time is a scarce resource and you can't manage it;
* complaining towards too much work and too less time will not make it less...
Just to make it simple: the message is "help yourself 'cause nobody else is going to do". Which is horribly true and - to my humble opinion - horribly wrong at the same time...
... infact, while we are teaching and coaching people to be adaptive, more and more, and to go around their issues in dealing with too much work, in having too little time for their relationships or in having no chance to rest, we are abandoning all routes that do not solve the problem.
That's a patch, not a solution.
Yes, we need to help people to be adaptive and have a great self-defensive mechanism, with huge Emotional Intelligence to be able to swallow what they can't change, but this is not a good excuse to give up on working solutions which - ultimately - means eliminating complexity and those who generate it.
Thinking back to the idea of the diet, well... you can't loose weight if you don't make a diet. Even if you can adapt buying larger dresses, you can't do it forever... sooner or later you will be on diet. Because that's the way to get to the right weight... and there's no alternative.
Similarly on life balance. If you want happiness and you are working too much... in the long term or you make your job a big part of your happiness or you find a way to work less. You can be resilient, adaptive and smart... but up to a point, if it's too much, working on yourself will not solve it.
We can help people to be more adaptive to challenges of time but we need to ensure that the fight to complexity, non-sense tasks and ridiculous working times continues!
The risk of forgetting this point is to crack the organization: infact, when adaptiveness will become a ritual and people will understand that only reaction to the question "isn't it too much" is a yoga session, most of the individuals will silently check out (physically or mentally), absenteism will raise and engagement will get out of the window.
All these theories and approaches based on individuals seem to forget the basic point that enhancing capability of individuals to deal with challenges is not a way to give up responsibilities (of top management, of people managers, of bosses, corporations...) in making work meaningful (and, as such, doable).
