In this episode of the Scaling Up Business podcast, host Bill Gallagher introduces a brief request from a second speaker seeking CEOs for a doctoral study on whether longer work hours correlate with poorer leadership. Gallagher then delivers the core "Busy Is Broken" manifesto, a concise declaration of his book’s philosophy: "Do less, do it better, do it together." He enumerates a series of principles—prioritizing clarity over hustle, protecting deep work, delegating outcomes, building leaders instead of dependencies, batching busy work, and emphasizing rest, sleep, movement, and personal boundaries. Gallagher repeatedly stresses that activity should not be confused with progress and that companies should be built to run without the founder’s constant presence. He concludes with a call to action: listeners are invited to take the Busy Is Broken diagnostic, compare their self‑ratings with team ratings, read or purchase the book, and implement one manifesto principle each week. Promotional details for the book, its website, and where to buy it are provided throughout.
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So I have a quick favor before we go.
I'm in the middle of my doctoral research and I need some CEOs. Here's the question: is there a point where working more hours actually indicates a worse leader? Nobody's measured it before. I'm measuring it now. So if you're a CEO or president with at least 10 people in the business and 3 direct reports, it takes just a few minutes and your team answers a few anonymous questions. But what you get back is a report comparing how you rate yourself to how your team rates you. That gap is usually the interesting part. The link is scalingcoach.com/study. Again, scalingcoach.com/study. The link's also in the show notes. Help me out now, please.
I spent 2 years writing a book. Here's what it comes down to. Hi everybody, my name is Bill Gallagher. I'm the author of Busy Is Broken. I'm the host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. This is the last, uh, of the series talking about the book. The book is out now. Uh, this episode's a little bit different. There's no cautionary tales this time. There's no data. There's just a declaration, a manifesto from the book adapted for your ears, and then a challenge for you. So let's get into it. Here is the Busy Is Broken manifesto. Do less, do it better, do it together. Clarity over hustle. Strategy. Love silence. Give your best hours to your best work. Choose the vital few. Say no politely, relentlessly. Play to your strengths. Delegate outcomes. Build leaders, not dependencies. Protect deep work. Batch the busy work. Ship when it's enough. Rest like a pro. Sleep, move, breathe. Recovery is performance. Be there for your life. Make it home for dinner. Show up at game night. Keep your date night sacred. Take vacations without phone calls or interventions. Hold a hand, not a phone. Calm is contagious. Model the boundaries. If you answer at midnight, you teach people midnight. Practice the clutch. Prepare, protect, perform, debrief. I refuse to confuse activity with progress. I refuse to burn out before it matters. I choose clarity over noise. I choose teams over heroics, systems over willpower, impact over hours. Build a company that runs without you. Grow people who outgrow their roles. Make time to think. Scale without suffering. This is the work. This is the way. So I hope that's useful. I hope it resonates in you. I want you to do less, but do it better. I want you to do it together. I want you to bring that clarity and that focus. I want the best people doing the best work. I don't want you filling in for everything. Everybody doing their job in the right way, right? I want you there for your life to have the moments of insight, to rest so that you're bringing your best thinking best for the hours that you actually are working. and you're connected to human beings. I want you building a business that you can step away from, not someday, but now, today. So here's my invitation. Go take the diagnostic at Busy Is Broken. Share it with your team. Compare your answers to theirs. You could read the book also and then pull it out and just do it manually. Pick one thing, just one thing from the series, and do that this week. Don't try to do everything that we've been talking about in the show or in the book. Do one thing at a time and then do it relentlessly until it becomes a habit. That's how you begin to rewrite the way you've run your business so that you aren't forever the bottleneck in the business. That's our series, right? That's this particular series for launch. If you haven't gotten it yet, go find the book. BusiestBroken.com is the website. We'll get some extra things there. The book you can find wherever you get your books, Amazon, et cetera.
Yeah.
Um, go get it, order it. Audiobook, Kindle e-reader, on and on. Uh, hardcover, softcover, like whatever. Should be everything that you want wherever you go. Get the one that works for you. Um, iAudio. I narrate the audiobook. So, if you like our show, you might like that version too. The book goes deeper than I can in these, in this series and on this, all the stories, all the tools, all the frameworks, all that in depth in the book. Lots of really great stories, more than 10 stories there from actual companies, real people, real things to learn from and think about how you compare. So keep scaling, but first, maybe reduce your sail. Maybe ease up the helm a little bit. Maybe back off. Maybe sleep a little bit better this week. I think that'll make a difference. I think you'll be a better leader. I think you'll have a stronger team. I think you'll do more critical thinking, be more strategic if you do work That way. Hope that's helpful for you. Until next time, keep scaling. Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.
