PERSON
Leslie Perlow
American organizational behaviorist (b. 1967), Konosuke Matsushita Professor at Harvard Business School, whose embedded ethnographic research established the structural case against always-on culture.
Leslie Perlow is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School and the foremost ethnographer of connectivity and cognitive work. Trained at MIT's Sloan School of Management, where she earned her PhD, Perlow has spent more than two decades conducting embedded research on how communication technologies, time pressure, and team norms shape knowledge-work performance. Her landmark BCG study — published in Sleeping with Your Smartphone (2012) — introduced Predictable Time Off and established the counterintuitive finding that structured disconnection improves rather than degrades the work of high-performing teams. Her earlier Finding Time (1997) established her focus on the structural rather than individual dimensions of overwork. The concept she is most identified with — the cycle of responsiveness — has become foundational vocabulary in the study of technology's impact on work.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Perlow's methodological signature is long-duration embedded observation. She does not administer surveys or conduct structured interviews. She sits in the offices. She attends the meetings. She watches the screens. She talks to workers