The Way We're Working Isn't Working

Tony Schwartz, founder of the consulting firm The Energy Project, argues that the dominant workplace ethic of "more, bigger, faster" is unsustainable and counterproductive. Drawing on multidisciplinary research and his firm's experience with organizations including Sony, Ford, Google, and Ernst & Young, Schwartz proposes a framework built around the deliberate management of four core sources of human energy: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Each corresponds to a fundamental human need: sustainability, security, self-expression, and significance.

Schwartz opens by documenting the scope of the crisis. A 2007–2008 global workforce study of 90,000 employees found that only 20 percent felt fully engaged at work, while 38 percent were disenchanted or disengaged. Companies with the most engaged employees saw a 19 percent increase in operating income; those with the least engaged experienced a 32 percent decline. The core problem, Schwartz argues, is that the primary transaction between employers and employees, time exchanged for money, fails to address the deeper needs that fuel great performance. Humans are not computers; they are designed to pulse between energy expenditure and energy renewal. To illustrate this principle, Schwartz draws on Florida State University researcher Anders Ericsson's landmark 1993 study of violinists at the Music Academy of Berlin. The best violinists practiced in focused sessions of no more than ninety minutes, took renewal breaks, slept nearly an hour more per night than less accomplished peers, and napped more during the day. Great performers work more intensely but also recover more deeply.

Before change is possible, Schwartz argues, people must develop self-awareness. He tells the story of a senior executive called Carl who became tearful when asked about his family's experience of his relentless travel schedule, recognizing for the first time an emotional cost he had never acknowledged. Schwartz also recounts the story of former KPMG CEO Eugene O'Kelly, who worked ceaselessly until a terminal brain tumor diagnosis prompted him to wonder whether balance might have made him more creative and productive.

Yet awareness alone is insufficient. Schwartz argues that willpower is a limited and quickly depleted resource, citing psychologist Roy Baumeister's experiments showing that subjects who had to resist eating chocolate chip cookies gave up on a subsequent puzzle almost 60 percent faster than those who faced no such temptation. Because willpower fails under sustained demand, Schwartz proposes replacing bad habits with positive "rituals": highly specific behaviors performed at designated times that become automatic over time. He outlines six keys to effective rituals, including defining them with extreme precision, focusing on positive actions rather than resisting negative ones, and enlisting others for accountability. He also introduces Harvard psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey's concept of "immunity to change," which holds that every commitment to change is counterbalanced by an often unconscious competing commitment driven by fear.

The book's second major section addresses physical energy, which Schwartz treats as foundational to all other dimensions. He identifies sleep as the single most important behavior influencing waking performance, citing research that averaging four hours of sleep for five consecutive nights impairs cognition equivalently to legal intoxication. He links sleep deprivation to disasters including the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. Beyond nightly sleep, Schwartz advocates intermittent renewal throughout the day aligned with the body's natural ninety-minute ultradian cycles, citing sleep researcher Peretz Lavie's experiments showing that "sleep gates" open every ninety minutes. He describes his own shift from writing for twelve straight hours to working in ninety-minute sprints with breaks, completing books in significantly less time. A NASA study found that pilots who took a forty-minute midflight nap had zero microsleeps, brief involuntary lapses into sleep, during the critical final 30 minutes of flight, while nonnapping pilots had 22. On exercise, Schwartz argues that interval training, short bursts of intense effort followed by recovery, builds cardiovascular capacity more efficiently than steady-state exercise. On nutrition, he recommends eating small meals every three hours to stabilize blood sugar and planning meals in advance rather than relying on willpower-depleting diets.

Schwartz argues that organizational culture must actively support physical renewal. He uses Sony Europe as a primary case study, where Managing Director Steve Dalton put all 270 factory employees through the program, cutting overtime in half, reducing sick days by 40 percent, and lowering turnover from 8.2 to 3.2 percent. At Ernst & Young, accountants who worked in ninety-minute sprints with afternoon gym breaks reported the least stressful busy season they had ever experienced while accomplishing more in fewer hours.

The third section turns to emotional energy. Schwartz presents four emotional quadrants: the Performance Zone (high positive energy), the Survival Zone (high negative energy such as anger and fear), the Burnout Zone (low negative energy), and the Renewal Zone (low positive energy such as calm and relaxation). The Survival Zone is driven by the amygdala, a brain region that floods the body with stress hormones and shuts down the prefrontal cortex. Schwartz argues that nearly all emotional triggers trace back to a feeling of being devalued, citing psychiatrist James Gilligan's finding that prison inmates consistently explained violence by saying "because he disrespected me." The antidote is building a larger reservoir of positive emotion through physical care, meaningful connections, and "realistic optimism": acknowledging difficult facts while choosing empowering interpretations. Schwartz defines leaders as "chief energy officers" whose most important quality, according to a metareview of over 200 leadership studies, is the ability to see positive qualities in others that those employees do not yet recognize in themselves.

The fourth section addresses mental energy, with attention as its central currency. Schwartz dismantles the myth of multitasking, citing research that switching between two tasks takes 25 percent longer than completing them sequentially. He recounts psychologist Walter Mischel's famous "marshmallow test," in which four-year-olds who could delay gratification by redirecting their attention grew up to be more confident, resilient, and self-reliant, and scored 210 points higher on SATs. Schwartz recommends building rituals around focus: turning off e-mail during concentrated work, tackling the most important task first each morning, and training attention through meditation. He also argues for cultivating the right hemisphere of the brain, which specializes in creative and empathic thinking but is systematically underdeveloped in most educational and corporate settings. At the organizational level, Schwartz advocates providing quiet spaces alongside collaborative ones and giving employees autonomy over when and where they work in exchange for clear accountability. He cites Best Buy's Results Oriented Work Environment (ROWE) program, in which employees free to work however they chose reduced turnover by up to 90 percent.

The final section addresses spiritual energy: the motivation derived from deeply held values and a sense of purpose beyond self-interest. Schwartz guides readers through exercises to identify core values and measure the gap between what they say matters most and how they actually invest their time. He connects the 2008 financial crisis to a collective failure of spiritual energy, noting that not a single senior executive at a major bank raised concerns about the reckless practices leading to the meltdown. Purpose, Schwartz argues, is found not in any particular role but in how one approaches work. He illustrates this with a motor vehicle bureau clerk who smiled and connected with every customer while her colleagues were disengaged; a photograph of her son reminded her that her job enabled his education.

Schwartz closes with case studies of Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony Europe, where thousands of employees completed his training. At Sony Pictures, co-chairmen Amy Pascal and Michael Lynton launched a values initiative and invested in employee well-being, with over 90 percent of the nearly 6,000 participants reporting more energy and focus at work. He frames the book's ultimate argument as an evolutionary shift from "me" to "us," arguing that sustainable performance depends on renewing rather than depleting the resources we share.