Things to Try at HQ

Thirty corporate big shots listened politely while the woman told them they were slaves. It was a meet­ing in London last February of a new entity called the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force, which counts 30 blue-chip firms among its members, from Alcoa to Unilever. The group focuses on breaking down barriers to advancement still faced by women and minorities. But one of its chief goals is to fix an equal-opportunity oppressor: "extreme" jobs. That project represents the first systematic effort by ma­jor companies to humanize senior work.

Madeleine Bunting, the British author of Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives, had been invited that day to provoke debate. Is the prevalence of extreme jobs а product of forces like technology and globalization? Or is it rather some­thing in which talented people are themselves com­plicit? Either way, Bunting said, old assumptions about how to work, how to show commitment, and how to advance are cruelly out of date. Decades af­ter women rejoined the workforce and two-income couples have become the norm, business and society haven't adequately adjusted. "Everyone has indi­vidual coping mechanisms," says Carolyn Buck­Luce, a senior partner at Ernst & Young who is help­ing lead the extreme-jobs review. But that's not an institutional solution."

Jon Katzenbach, who advises FORTUNE 500 managements on organizational issues, thinks it's possible to humanize top jobs­ - though no company has ever asked him to. Among the fixes he pro­motes is more effective use of teams. (That was a key aspect of Slager's reorganization at Ernst Young, where each due-diligence team now may work on several deals for a given client, rather than being assigned to deals piecemeal.) Katzenbach also urges companies to offer alternative career paths in which executives choose the speed of their pro­motions. Instead of having to make vice president in five years, for example, you'll be able to choose to get there over ten, perhaps while the kids are young and you prefer to avoid intensive travel.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Higher earners may consider trading income for time. Two professional parents, for instance, may arrange for each to work full tilt for nine months and then take off three, or work five days 9 to 4, except when there's a crisis. Maybe they'll handle three clients instead of six. To make any of it work, says Katzenbach, employers have to give senior people the freedom to define what they mean by success in their lives - and then ask them to trans­late that into how much time they're prepared to devote to the job. That still leaves room for exec­utives who love work so much they never want to leave, or who prefer the clarity of the office to the chaos of family life. As companies learn to ac­commodate a range of time commitments from top talent, organizations will look less like a pyramid and more like a puzzle.

If such transformations sound easier said than done, it's because of that roadblock, fear. A 2003 Harvard Business Review article, "Let's Hear It for B Players," illustrates the dilemma. It defines those who "place a high premium on work-life balance" as second-tier workers. The authors thought they were being generous to the Bs, pointing to them as underutilized assets overlooked in the rush to woo the workaholic highfliers. But the message, echoed across the culture, is clear: Declaring your inter­est in a human-sized job is like announcing a dis­ease. B-men may not often opt out of the work­force entirely, as do some women with high-earning husbands, but they scale back, switch to staff jobs, and turn down promotions. Or, like many women, they keep their B-ness a secret and suffer in silence.

FORTUNE encountered similar angst in a focus group of first-year students at the Wharton Busi­ness School. These future leaders were adamant about wanting full lives and cynical about feel-­good pronouncements on such matters by CEOs. Yet they also felt they had "no leverage," and that if they mentioned non-work as­pirations in job interviews they'd be seen as "slackers." They'd figure it out once they'd shown bosses they could do the work, they said.

The biggest challenge in human­izing work may be not how to get the work done but how to persuade corporate leaders to view the desire for a complete life as legitimate. It hasn't been a CEO priority, to put it mildly. Jack Welch, the iconic boss of the 1990s, wrote in his book Wining that he al­ways worked Saturdays as a rising star at GE, and found that his direct reports (surprise!) showed up to join him in the office. "I thought these weekend hours were a blast," Welch wrote. "The idea just didn't dawn on me that anyone would want to be anywhere but at work."

He was hardly alone. Other seventysomething empire builders - like Eli Broad of KB Homes and SunAmerica - describe themselves as "old school" in this regard. As Bob Knutson, 71, who built Education Management Corp., put it, being a child of the Depression grafted on to his native drive a "whatever it takes" work ethic that was hard to dial down even decades after he'd made it. That style has flowed to the current crop of bosses. Baby-­boomer Jeffrey Immelt, Welch's successor at GE, boasts that he has worked 100 hours a week for 2 years. That's 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week!

Schultz at Starbucks is among the minority of CEOs out to break the taboo against discussing 24/7 workloads. "You may not get what you want, but at least we're going to have this dialogue." he says. "And there'll never be a mark against you be­cause you asked for something." At Xerox, Ann Mulcahy wants top performers to come forward and say, "Here's the approach I'd like to use to de­liver the performance that I think is required." "It's got to be initiated by your best employees," she adds, to create a buzz around the company that in­novative job design is a way to keep great people.