Leslie A. Perlow

Leslie A. Perlow

Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership

Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership

Organizational Behavior
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Leslie A. Perlow
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(617) 495-6173
Featured Work Publications Research Summary Awards & Honors

Leslie A. Perlow is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership in the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School. She leads the LIFE Special Project, dedicated to helping individuals make purposeful life choices while gathering insights that will help us all understand how to live more fulfilling lives. As part of this initiative, she developed a second-year MBA elective, Crafting Your Life. The course inspires students to navigate life with greater intentionality, offering practical guidance for managing careers, relationships, and personal growth. Beyond the classroom, she leverages technology to create tools that foster self-discovery and enable learning through the data these tools collect. Her latest tool, the LIFE Matrix, shows users how their 168 weekly hours line up with their core values, and helps them identify the changes that could make the biggest impact.

Professor Perlow has two current streams of research. Her first focuses on how people can craft their best lives.  She collects and analyzes both quantitative data – from tools such as the LIFE Matrix and the LIFE Simulation – and qualitative data from interviews with individuals as part of a life history project she embarked on five years ago.

Her second stream of research focuses on the micro-dynamics of work and life. She has long studied how individuals act within organizations – what people do all day, how they spend their time, with whom they interact – and the consequences for both organizations and individuals. Recently, she launched several projects to explore hybrid work and how individuals' physical location – relative to co-workers, family, partners, or roommates – affects work productivity and personal well-being. She combines deep inductive qualitative research with data analytics to better understand and empower individuals and teams to improve the way they work.

Before joining the Harvard faculty, Professor Perlow was on the faculty of the University of Michigan Business School. She earned her B.A. in Economics from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in Organization Studies from MIT. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a management consultant.

 

Featured Work
Stop the Meeting Madness
How to free up time for meaningful work by Leslie A. Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley, and Eunice Eun
Manage Your Team's Collective Time
Time management is a group endeavor. Harvard Business School Professor Leslie Perlow shares how the payoff goes far beyond morale and retention.
Sleeping with Your Smartphone
How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work
Does it have to be this way? Can't resist checking your smartphone or mobile device? Sure, all this connectivity keeps you in touch with your team and the office--but at what cost? In "Sleeping with Your Smartphone," Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow reveals how you can disconnect and become more productive in the process. In fact, she shows that you can devote more time to your personal life and accomplish more at work.
TED Institute
Leslie Perlow: Thriving in an overconnected world
While email and mobile technology have greatly accelerated the way we do business, Leslie Perlow argues that the always “on” mentality can have a long-term detrimental effect on many organizations. In her sociological experiments at BCG and other organizations, Perlow found that if the team – rather than just individuals - collectively rallies around a goal of personal value, it unleashes a process that creates better work and better lives.
The Economist Intelligence Unit report
The Personalization Challenge: Business culture and mobile security
Video Interview: EIU Editor Riva Richmond interviews Harvard Business School Professor Leslie Perlow about the risks to organisations from the undirected, always-connected work enabled by mobile devices.
Switching off an "Always on" Culture
Leslie talks about the pervasive responsiveness trap in the workforce.

“The problem is that now everyone's on all the time and we come to expect that of each other. And then, we email each other late at night and we actually may or may not expect a response, initially.  But the person getting the e-mail, their response is, 'Well, maybe it’s not urgent but I should respond anyway and maybe it’s because I want to prove that had it been the clients, I was on.'"
Books
Journal Articles
Book Chapters
  • Perlow, Leslie. "Collaborative Implementation: 'What If,' Asked George?" In Research Alive: Exploring Generative Moments in Doing Qualitative Research. Vol. 27, edited by Arne Carlsen and Jane E. Dutton. Advances in Organization Studies. Copenhagen Business School Press, 2011. View Details
  • Trefalt, Spela, and Leslie Perlow. "Learning from Women Who Make It Work: A Call for Dynamic Flexibility." In Qualitative Organizational Research: Best Papers from the Davis Conference on Qualitative Research, edited by K. Elsbach, 227–251. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing (IAP), 2005. View Details
  • Perlow, Leslie. "Studying Work Groups in India, China, and Hungary." In Gaining Access: A Practical Guide for Field Researchers, edited by Martha S. Feldman, Jeannine Bell, and Michele Tracy Berger. Altamira Press, 2003. View Details
  • Perlow, Leslie, and L. Bailyn. "The Senseless Submergence of Difference: Engineers, Their Work and Their Careers." In Between Technology and Society: Technical Workers in Modern Workplaces, edited by B. Barley and J. Orr. Ithaca, NY: IRL Press, 1997. View Details
Cases and Teaching Materials
Research Summary
Research Summary

There has been tremendous change in the workplace — ubiquitous technology, 24/7 globalization, hyper-efficiency and now significant changes in work location. Professor Perlow’s research explores the implications for the ways we work and live, and what we can do to improve both. Her findings reveal that we have become less efficient, unable to plan or prioritize work; less effective, with speed substituting for strategy and innovation; and more isolated, overwhelmed, and harried as the dividing line between work and home disappears. She further finds that meaningful change is possible – change that leads to better work and better lives.

As an ethnographer, Professor Perlow conducts in-depth studies, often over multiple years. She has focused on firms in high tech, professional services, and pharmaceuticals examining co-located teams, hybrid teams, and global teams. She has lived for months at a time in both China and India to conduct research projects. She also led an ethnographic study that began with the sudden shift to virtual work in March 2020 and continued for 3 years as the organization grappled with how to most effectively implement hybrid work. Since then, she has launched several new projects to gather data on hybrid work and determine which practices make it most effective for individuals and for the teams of which they are a part. She documents individuals’ ways of working, including the use of technology, meetings, virtual interactions, and cross-cultural collaborations with global teams.  With these data, she explores the implications of workplace practices for organization productivity, individuals’ careers, and family lives.

To further her interest in helping individuals craft their best lives, she has started building digital tools to provide users insights about their life choices and tradeoffs.  These tools also enable her to collect rich quantitative data to further enhance our collective understanding. She built the LIFE Simulation after hearing from many people that, if they could live again, they would make different life choices.  The simulation gives participants the chance to “live” their lives in advance, providing a space to make mistakes before they truly count. She has collected data from tens of thousands of people, enabling her to study life choices.  Her latest tool, the LIFE Matrix, empowers individuals to discover if their 168 weekly hours match up with what truly matters to them.  It’s geared to help people assess their current time allocations, align their time with their core values, and take action on meaningful changes. Here too in the process of helping individuals, she is gathering data to discover what choices and tradeoffs lead to the most fulfilling lives, and therefore be better equipped to help individuals live their best lives.

In addition, Professor Perlow embarked on a life history project five years ago.  This project strives to capture MBA graduates experiences, choices, tradeoffs, and reflections, as they live out their lives pos- graduation.  To date, this study has provided key insights about choices around partnership, children, geography and career, as well as the role of luck and serendipity in life.


Awards & Honors
Recipient of the 2012 Work Life Legacy Award from the Families and Work Institute.
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