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wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green. Today I'm talking with

Aaron Reed and assistant professor of organization behavior at Boston University's

Questram School of Business. Erin, thank you so much for talking with us today.

I'm very happy to be here. Aaron, thank you so much for talking with us today.

I'm very happy to be here.

So, Aaron, you wrote a paper which was published in the very prestigious academic journal

Organization Science and in an article for HBR.org that is all about some really fascinating research findings.

You studied consultants working in a typical strategy consulting firm and found first that they're not all working the crazy 80 hour weeks that we maybe think that they're working or that they pretend to be working,

but also that there were some pretty interesting differences between men and men and women.

So I thought we'd just start with a quick overview

of the findings and then we can dig into the background

a little bit more.

Sure.

So I studied a fairly typical strategy consulting firm. It recruits from elite schools, it

works with some great companies, and they had work practices that seemed pretty common

across other consulting firms so they had this expectation there that people

would be available to travel on that they would be able to work all the time. They talked a lot about 60 to 80 hour

...