OAG Travel News

There was a time when I used to dread holidays. The very thought of taking off for a glorious fortnight (or heaven forbid, three weeks) to the sun-drenched Caribbean, the flesh-pots of the Cote d’Azur or one of those idyllic get-away-from-it-all islands in the Greek archipelago would be enough to send me into a catatonic tail-spin.

Ah, yes, I can hear you murmur; one of those born-again workaholics. Not so, I’m as intrinsically idle as the next man. And as a professional wheel-spinner, I’ve always been able to rationalize any amount of time spent away from the office.

No, I was a victim of what management theologians recognize as ‘holiday stress,’ a major factor in executive morbidity. Remove the day-to-day pressures and preoccupations of the office and a new kind of anxiety takes over. More insidious, more debilitating; a kind of free-flowing angst about your job and career that can make you a candidate for Paranoids Anonymous.

Holiday stress is endemic among business travelers and reaches an acute stage when the holiday is about to expire. This is known as the ‘re-entry syndrome.’

They say it takes the first week of a holiday to unwind, the second week to relax and the third week to worry about what you might find (or not find) when you get back to the office. Have they reviewed the budget figures without you? Can they do that? You bet they can!

Suddenly you see the dark significance of the chairman’s parting words. Karl, your assistant, might be in the chairman’s office right now mortgaging your department for the next three years. Maybe you are the chairman. But where was Mikhail Gorbachev during his management revolution? Unwinding at a Black Sea Resort with the BBC World Service of course.

You may fancy yourself as a latter-day Genghis Khan. But what are you going to do about the threat of a palace revolution if you’re cruising on your mentor’s yacht off the Turkish coast? To paraphrase Clausewitz: holidays are the continuation of politics by other means.

So much for the aetiology of holiday stress; what can be done about it? A prescription of sorts was revealed to me in one of those rare Archimedean moments at the poolside of the Tel Aviv Hilton during a business trip last summer. I was exercising my management style with a toothsome bimbo at the bar, when I ran into my old friend Sammy Kalbfleisch (a half-generation American who had wisely refrained from anglicizing his name to Vealsteak). Shrugging off his entourage of American divorcees, he sat down to discuss the problem. Had I read Stanley Zilch’s new book, ‘Zen and the Art of Holiday Management’?

It transpired that Zilch, director of Blue Skies Research Institute in Broken Springs, Colorado, had come up with a powerful management tool for salvaging the sanity of holiday exiles called Management by Absence. Since that fateful encounter, I’ve never looked back – except for an occasional glance over my shoulder when I go on holiday.

Sedulous practitioners of Management by Absence (MBAs) know how to stifle signs of incipient holiday stress by observing the following rules:

Make sure you are at the centre of the universe. Take the principal movers and shakers with you to limit the downside risk; send them on holiday themselves; or organize an incentive conference, say on a Caribbean cruise, during your absence. Or else hand them grueling assignments that will occupy them fruitlessly while you’re away. One way to do this is to get your PA to release time bombs in the form of urgent memos every few days. Professional MBAs are adept at the ‘planned crisis.’ The idea is to create a diversion from any thought of insurrection by creating a problem that has to await your return for a miraculous resolution.

While you’re away, keep in touch. This doesn’t mean phoning the office every day, but using your laptop to send a stream of (pre-programmed) disquieting e-mails. ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you,’ is an old cliché but a powerful one. Make ominous hints of a major reorganization when you get back to the office. Assign people spurious tasks to give credence to this eventuality.

Relax. After all, this is the objective. The best ideas are said to come in breaks between bursts of intellectual effort.  Use the siesta to dredge the subconscious for new ideas.

Make sure you’re missed. Nature abhors a vacuum. The planned chaos and confusion you have sown should make everyone clamour for your return. This should always be unexpected – say the Friday before rather than the Monday morning.

With luck you may be hailed as a deus ex machina.; in which case you might decide to take more holiday next year. It’s a great way to run a business.

www.rogerandrandy.com