Business
Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, on work-life balance as a CEO: ‘I’m still going to chaperone the first-grade field trip’
Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, has a lot on her plate: She’s founder and CEO of home and lifestyle brand As Ever, is the mother of two, has a media arm Archewell Productions and oversees her charitable work through the Archewell Foundation, which she founded with her husband Prince Harry in 2020.
But the Duchess doesn’t let all of her work and charitable demands get in the way of spending time with her family.
“I want the life-work balance, if such a thing exists,” she said at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women conference in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. “I’m still going to go and chaperone the first-grade field trip, and then run back and try to finish the meetings.” She also recently told the Aspire podcast with Emma Grede she loves packing her kids’ lunches. “That sounds ridiculous, but I love it,” the Duchess said.
Meghan said her team at As Ever is lean at fewer than 10 people. The Duchess said she stays heavily involved in the creative aspect of her brand, which sells home goods like marmalades, teas, and cookie mixes, but that she is also involved in crunching the numbers.
“The brand is an extension of my aesthetic,” she told Fortune’s Editor in Chief Alyson Shontell. “But it’s more than that. The operational side is so key. I am constantly looking at ways in which we can adjust our margins [and what] our spend looks like [by] really going through P&L.”
The Duchess launched As Ever this year with Netflix as her major investor and partner—and demand has been strong. Some of her products sold out within hours, even when Markle says her team assumed inventory would last weeks.
What other CEOs say about work-life balance
Many CEOs of large companies don’t necessarily prioritize work-life balance; many see work as life and life as work.
In fact, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Reid Hoffman have denounced work-life balance. Bezos recently said he sees it more as “work-life harmony.”
“If you’re happy at home, you’ll be better at work,” he said at Italian Tech Week earlier this month. “If you’re better at work, you’ll be better at home. These things go together. It’s not a strict tradeoff.”
Hoffman, on the other hand, has said that for founders to be successful, they have to be “committed to winning.”
“The only really great founders are [the ones who are] like, ‘I am going to put literally everything into doing this,’” he told Stanford University’s How to Start a Startup class in 2014.
Cerebras cofounder and CEO, Andrew Feldman also recently issued a harsh warning for startup founders: “This notion that somehow you can achieve greatness, you can build something extraordinary by working 38 hours a week and having work-life balance, that is mind-boggling to me.”
“It’s not true in any part of life,” he said.
Still, some CEOs have a similar outlook on work-life balance to the Duchess. Indra Nooyi, for example, said at the 2019 Fortune MPW conference that while “work and family is going to be a challenge,” it’s a critical issue that needs to be addressed in the workforce.
“When bias happens in the workforce, it strips away a woman’s confidence,” she said. “When it attacks your confidence, it attacks your competence.”
