Burnout Is Not Beaten by Pushing Harder

In the article “How business schools teach leaders to beat burnout,” the Financial Times looks at how different executive MBA programmes are making resilience, wellbeing, and stress management part of their core curriculum. The article features Firstbeat as part of the approach at IMD Business School in Lausanne, where the EMBA participants can wear a Firstbeat monitor periodically over a period of several months to see what their stress and recovery levels look like on different days and nights.

Intensity and Stress Are Not the Same Thing

The article opens with Daniel Ulbrich, Senior Director at Capri Sun Group and IMD Executive MBA participant, sharing his insights. One morning, he had back-to-back meetings, demanding discussions, and almost no downtime, and he expected to be exhausted by lunchtime. However, his Firstbeat data told a different story: much of the morning showed physiological recovery because he was working on subjects that inspired him.

“It was a powerful lesson that intensity and stress are not necessarily the same thing,” Ulbrich told the FT.

The measurements also challenged his assumptions about recovery. His results suggested that even one glass of wine delayed his overnight recovery. They also showed that adding 60–90 minutes to his usual six hours of sleep resulted in particularly strong recovery.

From Data to Conscious Trade-Offs

With two young children, a senior job, and the EMBA program, Ulbrich says eight hours of sleep every night is not realistic. Instead, the data encouraged him to make some conscious trade-offs and to try micro-breaks and walk-and-talk meetings.

“For me, resilience now means being able to perform at a high level today without systematically borrowing from tomorrow.”

Recovery as Part of Performance

According to Alyson Meister, Professor of Leadership and Dean of Degree Programmes at IMD, management education is changing. Wellbeing is no longer treated as remedial support. Instead, schools are teaching executives how to sustain wellbeing and performance. IMD has made “managing energy for sustainable performance” part of its core curriculum.

The FT article points out that elite athletes have long understood something executives are only beginning to embrace – that recovery is a key part of performance. This principle has been at the heart of Firstbeat’s work from the start and it’s great to see it reaching leadership education as well.

Read the full article in the Financial Times: How business schools teach leaders to beat burnout