text: When Today Show host Matt Lauer sat down with General Motors’ (GM) CEO Mary Barra in late June, he asked the automaker’s first female leader: 
   
   You said in an interview not long ago that your kids said they’re going to hold you accountable for one job, and that is being a mom. Given the pressure at General Motors, can you do both well? 
   
   Barra graciously answered the question, telling Lauer that she has a great team, a wonderful family and a supportive husband. Notably, she didn’t turn that question back on Lauer to ask how he handles his demanding work schedule at NBC and still manages to be a good father. 
   
   Male executives almost never hear that question. MongoDB’s now-former CEO Max Schireson can attest to that. 
   
   The head of the database company decided to step down Tuesday after asking himself how he can balance the dual demands of fatherhood and running a company. 
   
   “As a male CEO, I have been asked what kind of car I drive and what type of music I like, but never how I balance the demands of being both a dad and a CEO,” wrote Schireson in a blog post explaining why he decided to step down as the chief executive for MongoDB. 
   
   Women are still the focus of the “having it all” debate and questions of whether or not they can be wildly successful at both a high-powered job and day-to-day parenting. Now their male counterparts are asking the same question of themselves. 
   
   Schireson, who helped grow the database company into a billion-dollar business, is on pace to fly 300,000 miles this year between the normal CEO travel duties and commuting from his home in Palo Alto, Calif. to the company’s New York City office. 
   
   All that time on the road adds up to many hours and days away from his family, including three kids. 
   
   “During that travel, I have missed a lot of family fun, perhaps, more importantly, I was not with my kids when our puppy was hit by a car, or when my son had (minor and successful, and of course unexpected) emergency surgery.” 
   
   He credits his wife for helping to pick up the slack when he was away. Not an easy task considering her high-pressure role as a doctor and Stanford professor. 
   
   “Friends and colleagues often ask my wife how she balances her job and motherhood,” Schireson wrote. “Somehow, the same people don’t ask me.” 
   
   Questions like these have gnawed at women, who openly debate the value of work and family. Sheryl Sandberg has encouraged women to “lean in.” Cover articles in national magazines have delved into the minutiae of making the right choice as a mom and a professional, not to mention the countless blog posts in response to both. 
   
   While it’s enviable that Schireson can step down as CEO to simply work “normal full time” as vice chairman, the fact that a male CEO is asking the same questions that a female CEO might ask is an important step towards leveling the playing field for top executives, regardless of their gender. 
   
   It’s time for the “having it all” debate to move beyond gender. The math is the same, as Schireson concludes, whether you’re male or female: ||||| Juliette Kayyem, who several years ago left the Department of Homeland Security soon after her husband, David Barron, left a high position in the Justice Department, says their joint decision to leave Washington and return to Boston sprang from their desire to work on the “happiness project,” meaning quality time with their three children. (She borrowed the term from her friend Gretchen Rubin, who wrote a best-selling book and now runs a blog with that name.) 
   
   It’s time to embrace a national happiness project. As a daughter of Charlottesville, Virginia, the home of Thomas Jefferson and the university he founded, I grew up with the Declaration of Independence in my blood. Last I checked, he did not declare American independence in the name of life, liberty, and professional success. Let us rediscover the pursuit of happiness, and let us start at home. 
   
   Innovation Nation 
   
   As I write this, I can hear the reaction of some readers to many of the proposals in this essay: It’s all fine and well for a tenured professor to write about flexible working hours, investment intervals, and family-comes-first management. But what about the real world? Most American women cannot demand these things, particularly in a bad economy, and their employers have little incentive to grant them voluntarily. Indeed, the most frequent reaction I get in putting forth these ideas is that when the choice is whether to hire a man who will work whenever and wherever needed, or a woman who needs more flexibility, choosing the man will add more value to the company. 
   
   In fact, while many of these issues are hard to quantify and measure precisely, the statistics seem to tell a different story. A seminal study of 527 U.S. companies, published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2000, suggests that “organizations with more extensive work-family policies have higher perceived firm-level performance” among their industry peers. These findings accorded with a 2003 study conducted by Michelle Arthur at the University of New Mexico. Examining 130 announcements of family-friendly policies in The Wall Street Journal, Arthur found that the announcements alone significantly improved share prices. In 2011, a study on flexibility in the workplace by Ellen Galinsky, Kelly Sakai, and Tyler Wigton of the Families and Work Institute showed that increased flexibility correlates positively with job engagement, job satisfaction, employee retention, and employee health. 
   
   This is only a small sampling from a large and growing literature trying to pin down the relationship between family-friendly policies and economic performance. Other scholars have concluded that good family policies attract better talent, which in turn raises productivity, but that the policies themselves have no impact on productivity. Still others argue that results attributed to these policies are actually a function of good management overall. What is evident, however, is that many firms that recruit and train well-educated professional women are aware that when a woman leaves because of bad work-family balance, they are losing the money and time they invested in her. 
   
   Even the legal industry, built around the billable hour, is taking notice. Deborah Epstein Henry, a former big-firm litigator, is now the president of Flex-Time Lawyers, a national consulting firm focused partly on strategies for the retention of female attorneys. In her book Law and Reorder, published by the American Bar Association in 2010, she describes a legal profession “where the billable hour no longer works”; where attorneys, judges, recruiters, and academics all agree that this system of compensation has perverted the industry, leading to brutal work hours, massive inefficiency, and highly inflated costs. The answer—already being deployed in different corners of the industry—is a combination of alternative fee structures, virtual firms, women-owned firms, and the outsourcing of discrete legal jobs to other jurisdictions. Women, and Generation X and Y lawyers more generally, are pushing for these changes on the supply side; clients determined to reduce legal fees and increase flexible service are pulling on the demand side. Slowly, change is happening. 
   
   At the core of all this is self-interest. Losing smart and motivated women not only diminishes a company’s talent pool; it also reduces the return on its investment in training and mentoring. In trying to address these issues, some firms are finding out that women’s ways of working may just be better ways of working, for employees and clients alike. 
   
   Experts on creativity and innovation emphasize the value of encouraging nonlinear thinking and cultivating randomness by taking long walks or looking at your environment from unusual angles. In their new book, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, the innovation gurus John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas write, “We believe that connecting play and imagination may be the single most important step in unleashing the new culture of learning.” 
   
   Space for play and imagination is exactly what emerges when rigid work schedules and hierarchies loosen up. Skeptics should consider the “California effect.” California is the cradle of American innovation—in technology, entertainment, sports, food, and lifestyles. It is also a place where people take leisure as seriously as they take work; where companies like Google deliberately encourage play, with Ping-Pong tables, light sabers, and policies that require employees to spend one day a week working on whatever they wish. Charles Baudelaire wrote: “Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” Google apparently has taken note. 
   
   No parent would mistake child care for childhood. Still, seeing the world anew through a child’s eyes can be a powerful source of stimulation. When the Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling wrote The Strategy of Conflict, a classic text applying game theory to conflicts among nations, he frequently drew on child-rearing for examples of when deterrence might succeed or fail. “It may be easier to articulate the peculiar difficulty of constraining [a ruler] by the use of threats,” he wrote, “when one is fresh from a vain attempt at using threats to keep a small child from hurting a dog or a small dog from hurting a child.” 
   
   The books I’ve read with my children, the silly movies I’ve watched, the games I’ve played, questions I’ve answered, and people I’ve met while parenting have broadened my world. Another axiom of the literature on innovation is that the more often people with different perspectives come together, the more likely creative ideas are to emerge. Giving workers the ability to integrate their non-work lives with their work—whether they spend that time mothering or marathoning—will open the door to a much wider range of influences and ideas. 
   
   Enlisting Men 
   
   Perhaps the most encouraging news of all for achieving the sorts of changes that I have proposed is that men are joining the cause. In commenting on a draft of this article, Martha Minow, the dean of the Harvard Law School, wrote me that one change she has observed during 30 years of teaching law at Harvard is that today many young men are asking questions about how they can manage a work-life balance. And more systematic research on Generation Y confirms that many more men than in the past are asking questions about how they are going to integrate active parenthood with their professional lives. 
   
   Abstract aspirations are easier than concrete trade-offs, of course. These young men have not yet faced the question of whether they are prepared to give up that more prestigious clerkship or fellowship, decline a promotion, or delay their professional goals to spend more time with their children and to support their partner’s career. 
   
   Yet once work practices and work culture begin to evolve, those changes are likely to carry their own momentum. Kara Owen, the British foreign-service officer who worked a London job from Dublin, wrote me in an e-mail: 
   
   I think the culture on flexible working started to change the minute the Board of Management (who were all men at the time) started to work flexibly—quite a few of them started working one day a week from home. 
   
   Men have, of course, become much more involved parents over the past couple of decades, and that, too, suggests broad support for big changes in the way we balance work and family. It is noteworthy that both James Steinberg, deputy secretary of state, and William Lynn, deputy secretary of defense, stepped down two years into the Obama administration so that they could spend more time with their children (for real). 
   
   Going forward, women would do well to frame work-family balance in terms of the broader social and economic issues that affect both women and men. After all, we have a new generation of young men who have been raised by full-time working mothers. Let us presume, as I do with my sons, that they will understand “supporting their families” to mean more than earning money. 
   
   I have been blessed to work with and be mentored by some extraordinary women. Watching Hillary Clinton in action makes me incredibly proud—of her intelligence, expertise, professionalism, charisma, and command of any audience. I get a similar rush when I see a front-page picture of Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, deep in conversation about some of the most important issues on the world stage; or of Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, standing up forcefully for the Syrian people in the Security Council. 
   
   These women are extraordinary role models. If I had a daughter, I would encourage her to look to them, and I want a world in which they are extraordinary but not unusual. Yet I also want a world in which, in Lisa Jackson’s words, “to be a strong woman, you don’t have to give up on the things that define you as a woman.” That means respecting, enabling, and indeed celebrating the full range of women’s choices. “Empowering yourself,” Jackson said in her speech at Princeton, “doesn’t have to mean rejecting motherhood, or eliminating the nurturing or feminine aspects of who you are.” 
   
   I gave a speech at Vassar last November and arrived in time to wander the campus on a lovely fall afternoon. It is a place infused with a spirit of community and generosity, filled with benches, walkways, public art, and quiet places donated by alumnae seeking to encourage contemplation and connection. Turning the pages of the alumni magazine (Vassar is now coed), I was struck by the entries of older alumnae, who greeted their classmates with Salve (Latin for “hello”) and wrote witty remembrances sprinkled with literary allusions. Theirs was a world in which women wore their learning lightly; their news is mostly of their children’s accomplishments. Many of us look back on that earlier era as a time when it was fine to joke that women went to college to get an “M.R.S.” And many women of my generation abandoned the Seven Sisters as soon as the formerly all-male Ivy League universities became coed. I would never return to the world of segregated sexes and rampant discrimination. But now is the time to revisit the assumption that women must rush to adapt to the “man’s world” that our mothers and mentors warned us about. 
   
   I continually push the young women in my classes to speak more. They must gain the confidence to value their own insights and questions, and to present them readily. My husband agrees, but he actually tries to get the young men in his classes to act more like the women—to speak less and listen more. If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal. We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too. We have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many men standing beside us. 
   
   We’ll create a better society in the process, for all women. We may need to put a woman in the White House before we are able to change the conditions of the women working at Walmart. But when we do, we will stop talking about whether women can have it all. We will properly focus on how we can help all Americans have healthy, happy, productive lives, valuing the people they love as much as the success they seek. 
   
   We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com. ||||| In a blog post on his personal site Tuesday, Max Schireson, the CEO of the software company MongoDB, announced that he was leaving his position because he couldn't continue to properly run the company in New York and support his family in California. 
   
   "Friends and colleagues often ask my wife how she balances her job and motherhood," Schireson wrote, citing recent high profile interviews with the CEO of GM or the CEO of Pepsi. "Somehow, the same people don't ask me." 
   
   "As a male CEO, I have been asked what kind of car I drive and what type of music I like, but never how I balance the demands of being both a dad and a CEO," Schireson added, explaining that he loves spending time with his kids but doesn't love what he's missing when he's away from them because of his job. He also discussed the amount of work his wife – herself a doctor and a professor – does when he's gone. 
   
   Schireson will remain with the company as Vice Chairman, supporting MongoDB's new CEO. In an interview with Forbes, he said that choosing to spend time with his family (which is often a code phrase people use when they've been forced out) "is not a euphemism." 
   
   Advertisement 
   
   "I hope that me telling this story in my position will help others feel more comfortable in making similar choices," Schireson told The Today Show. "And help people in senior leadership roles be more public about it." 
   
   On his site, Schireson wrote that he's aware that this decision might put him out of the running "from some future CEO role": 
   
   Will that cost me tens of millions of dollars someday? Maybe. Life is about choices. Right now, I choose to spend more time with my family and am confident that I can continue to have an meaningful and rewarding work life while doing so. At first, it seemed like a hard choice, but the more I have sat with the choice the more certain I am that it is the right choice. 
   
   Advertisement 
   
   The responses to his blog post are overwhelmingly positive; even his daughter wrote in to say, "I'm glad you will be able to spend more time with us at home. yayyyyy." 
   
   It's somewhat fascinating, however, to consider what the response would be if a woman did the same thing as Schireson; she'd probably be at the receiving end of concern from other women that she was giving up her career. (Though as Schireson touches on, women who focus too much on their careers are judged just as much. Women: they can't win.). But with regards to work-life balance, men and women are struggling to each be accepted for doing the thing the other one has traditionally done without notice or praise. Maybe eventually we'll meet in the middle. ||||| Earlier this summer, Matt Lauer asked Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, whether she could balance the demands of being a mom and being a CEO. The Atlantic asked similar questions of PepsiCo’s female CEO Indra Nooyi. As a male CEO, I have been asked what kind of car I drive and what type of music I like, but never how I balance the demands of being both a dad and a CEO. 
   
   While the press haven’t asked me, it is a question that I often ask myself. Here is my situation: 
   
   * I have 3 wonderful kids at home, aged 14, 12 and 9, and I love spending time with them: skiing, cooking, playing backgammon, swimming, watching movies or Warriors or Giants games, talking, whatever. 
   
   * I am on pace to fly 300,000 miles this year, all the normal CEO travel plus commuting between Palo Alto and New York every 2-3 weeks. During that travel, I have missed a lot of family fun, perhaps more importantly, I was not with my kids when our puppy was hit by a car or when my son had (minor and successful, and of course unexpected) emergency surgery. 
   
   * I have an amazing wife who also has an important career; she is a doctor and professor at Stanford where, in addition to her clinical duties, she runs their training program for high risk obstetricians and conducts research on on prematurity, surgical techniques, and other topics. She is a fantastic mom, brilliant, beautiful, and infinitely patient with me. I love her, I am forever in her debt for finding a way to keep the family working despite my crazy travel. I should not continue abusing that patience. 
   
   Friends and colleagues often ask my wife how she balances her job and motherhood. Somehow, the same people don’t ask me. 
   
   A few months ago, I decided the only way to balance was by stepping back from my job. MongoDB is a special company. In my nearly 4 years at the company, we have raised $220 million, grown the team 15x and grown sales 30x. We have amazing customers, a great product which gets better with every release, the strongest team I have ever worked with, and incredible momentum in the market. The future is bright and MongoDB deserves a leader who can be “all-in” and make the most of the opportunity. 
   
   Unfortunately, I cannot be that leader given the geography of the majority of the company in New York and my family in California. 
   
   I recognize that by writing this I may be disqualifying myself from some future CEO role. Will that cost me tens of millions of dollars someday? Maybe. Life is about choices. Right now, I choose to spend more time with my family and am confident that I can continue to have an meaningful and rewarding work life while doing so. At first, it seemed like a hard choice, but the more I have sat with the choice the more certain I am that it is the right choice. 
   
   In one month, I will hand the CEO role to an incredibly capable leader in Dev Ittycheria. He will have the task of leading the company through its next phase of growth (though thankfully not of commuting across the country while doing it!). I know the company will be in great hands; his skills fit our next phase of growth better than mine do. And I will be there to help (full time, but “normal full time” and not “crazy full time”) in whatever areas he needs help. More about the announcement can be found in today’s press release. 
   
   I hope I will be able to find a way to craft a role at MongoDB which is engaging, impactful, and compatible with the most important responsibilities in my life. As great as this job has been, I look forward to creating one which is even better. 
   
   — Max ||||| Billion-dollar database company MongoDB has announced a new CEO, outsider Dev Ittycheria, after just one year with Max Schireson at the helm. A former software CEO turned investor, Ittycheria will become president and CEO as of September 3, when Schireson will drop into a vice chairman role. 
   
   Ittycheria joins from OpenView Partners, a middle-stage venture capital firm focused on software. Before that, he did a quick stint as a venture partner at Sand Hill Road stalwart Greylock Partners. An electrical engineer by trade, Ittycheria's managing experience comes as president of BMC Software and as cofounder and CEO of BladeLogic, a company he sold to BMC in 2008 for $900 million. 
   
   The Palo Alto-based Schireson had been CEO of MongoDB for a year and a few months, assuming the title last January after joining the company in 2011 as president. But Schireson says his tour of duty as leader was really more the almost four years he spent in the two roles, because as he puts it, "There wasn't a heck of a lot of difference as CEO from when I was president, because everyone except [cofounder and chairman] Dwight [Merriman] had to answer to me." He had joined the company from MarkLogic, where he'd served as COO, as well as nine years as a vice president at Oracle . 
   
   [Update]: In a call with Forbes, Schireson says that he decided to step down because of the toll imposed on him by constant travel between the company's New York City and Palo Alto headquarters and from customer visits. Spending more time with his family, the outgoing CEO says, "is not a euphemism. It's something I needed to do for my family, and there's never a convenient time." 
   
   A tipping point for Schireson came on a long-delayed overnight flight to Austin. The CEO woke up in Tuscon to discover his flight had gone through an emergency landing and needed to replace some crew members traumatized by the experience--all while he slept, desperately trying to catch up on rest. "In that moment, I realized, 'What am I doing?'" 
   
   Schireson's also been a CEO at times uncomfortable with the spotlight. Back in September, he wrote a blog post, "The Challenge of Being an Introverted CEO," in which he noted that he struggled to meet new employees and handle the more social aspects of the job. He reflected: 
   
   "As for my effectiveness in running the company, perhaps I would be more effective if I were more gregarious with the team. Certainly they would like it day to day. On the other hand, I do think there are advantages to my style. In larger groups I often like to hang back and listen. One of the hardest things for a CEO as a company gets large is having good data. While I am not a magnetic outgoing leader, I think I can listen well and I have high empathy. And I think we have built a strong team and they are pointed in a good direction." 
   
   Schireson says he's most proud of of the trust the company's gained from major customers like banks and big internet companies, but he also oversaw the company's ascent to the top of the private tech company ranks in New York City. Back in October, the company raised $150 million in October of 2013 from investors led by Fidelity Investments and with new investors Altimeter Capital and T. Rowe Price. That deal valued the company at $1.2 billion, putting it in the ranks of unicorn billion-dollar startups, and also validated its NoSQL database approach with some other tech heavyweights, as Salesforce.com , Intel Capital and Red Hat all invested alongside top venture firms Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates. 
   
   Ittycheria inherits a company with over $231 million in funding and more than 600 customers including Cisco, MetLife, MTV and Forbes, charging them annual subscription revenues per server for its database solution and additional features. 
   
   The company once known at 10gen remains dual-headquartered in both New York and Palo Alto, where Schireson was based, with more than 400 employees across at least 8 global offices. 10gen had been founded in 2007 by Merriman, a cofounder of ad tech company DoubleClick that became the backbone of Google's online advertising offerings, as well as by ShopWiki cofounder Eliot Horowitz, now the company's CTO. Merriman also cofounded Business Insider and Gilt Groupe alongside longtime business partner Kevin Ryan and remains chairman of MongoDB. 
   
   "We are delighted that Dev will be leading the next leg of our amazing growth," Merriman said in a press release on the news. "Max has built a world-class team that has shipped great software, raised a record amount of money from smart investors, attracted hundreds of great partners and generated millions in revenue from the world's leading companies. Dev's skills are a fantastic addition as we continue to grow our leadership in the market." 
   
   Ittycheria brings more operations expertise than the company's two previous CEOs, both with technical backgrounds, which Schireson says will be critical for the company to continue to expand global sales. But perhaps most importantly, Ittycheria's willing to take up the bi-coastal challenge, which Schireson argues is tough on the top executive but good for customers who get local executive presences and sales reps. 
   
   Most importantly, Ittycheria's got the spotlight from now on, as Schireson gets his wish for a future of more anonymity. 
   
   This story has been updated with comment from MongoDB CEO Max Schireson.
target: – Until now, the public debate of work-vs-family has focused more on female workers than male ones. So Max Schireson's decision to demote himself at a major software company and move back home with his family is turning a few heads, Jezebel reports. "Friends and colleagues often ask my wife how she balances her job and motherhood," wrote Schireson in a blog post. "Somehow, the same people don't ask me." His 19-month stint at the helm of MongoDB in New York City has been successful—he helped turn it "into a billion-dollar business," Fortune notes—but the time away from his wife, children, and puppy in Palo Alto, Calif., has proved just too hard. Among his reasons: "I have 3 wonderful kids at home, aged 14, 12 and 9, and I love spending time with them." His "amazing wife" has "an important career" as a doctor and Stanford professor. "I love her, I am forever in her debt for finding a way to keep the family working despite my crazy travel. I should not continue abusing that patience." "On pace to fly 300,000 miles this year," he's missed a lot of family fun plus his son's minor surgery and the puppy being hit by a car. A turning point came when his plane made an emergency landing in Tucson and he slept through the whole thing, he tells Forbes: "In that moment, I realized, 'What am I doing?'" "Will that cost me tens of millions of dollars someday?" he writes. "Maybe. Life is about choices. " Reactions on his blog are mostly enthusiastic, but Jezebel notes that a woman couldn't do this without people getting concerned. On a positive note, Fortune says it may be a "step towards leveling the playing field for top executives, regardless of their gender." One reaction was definitely favorable—a blog comment from Schireson's daughter: "I'm glad you will be able to spend more time with us at home. yayyyyy."