The Four-Day Workweek

This provocative book makes a compelling case for reducing the number of workdays in a week to four. Globalization has brought with it fiercer competition and greater worker mobility, and as organizations compete for top talent, they are becoming more open to unconventional worker arrangements, such as remote working and flextime.
International business expert, Robert Grosse, draws on scholarly research to construct an appealing argument for why the four-day workweek benefits both the organization and the employee. Research has demonstrated that longer work hours harm the individual and don't amount to a more effective organization, which begs the question: then why do it? The book goes beyond merely arguing that a reduced workweek is a good idea. It delves into why, explores the means for achieving it, and scrutinizes the barriers to getting there.
This is a book for forward-thinking executives, leaders, and academics who understand that work-life balance is the secret sauce not only for organizational success, but also for greater productivity and satisfaction in their careers and those of the people they manage.

Professor Robert E. Grosse is Dean of the School of Business Administration at American University of Sharjah, and was 2012-2014 President of the Academy of International Business. He has taught international finance in the MBA programmes at Thunderbird, the University of Miami, the University of Michigan, the Instituto de Empresa (Madrid, Spain), and in many universities in Latin America, and he lectures on executive education programmes around the world. He was founding Director of Standard Bank Group's (South Africa) executive education programme, the Global Leadership Centre, offering leadership development training to 11,000 managers and executives. He is a leading author on international business topics, and his latest book, Can Latin American Firms Compete? was published by Oxford University Press in 2007.

1. Introduction 2. Quality of Life 3. Motivation and Productivity 4. What Will People Do with More Time Free from Work? 5. Compensation 6. Man vs. Machine - Job Losses with Technology Advances 7. Logistics - How Can It Be Done? 8. Some History on Length of the Workweek 9. The Future of Work 10. This Won't Work 11. Conclusions