(FORTUNE Magazine) – SOMETIME in the last decade an 11th commandment -- Achieve excellence in your work -- crept into the set of grand precepts by which we are to live our lives. For the mass of baby-boomers struggling to make their mark, the new creed was particularly useful. ''With the world so competitive, how do you distinguish yourself without excellence?'' was one Silicon Valley boomer's view until recently. Corporate chiefs eager to get their companies lean and productive found this workism a godsend, producing as it did a crop of purposeful, gung-ho lieutenants willing to fly anywhere and work all night, a splendid example to the rest of the troops. But now many hard chargers have begun to have second thoughts. Has something gone awry? That be-the-best ethic has been warped into a dictate more like, You cannot work too hard or too long. A new corporate style dubbed the ''high commitment'' model has sprung up, suggesting ominously that your life should revolve around work and not much else. And top management doesn't sound as if it's slacking off in its demands. (See the CEO Poll, following.) ''Nobody ever got up on a desk and said, 'Work harder,' '' says a former executive at Bankers Trust. ''But somebody would call an occasional meeting at 8 A.M. Then it became the regular 8 o'clock meeting. So there was the occasional 7 A.M. meeting. And the dinner meetings. It just kept spreading.'' At many companies the kind of punishing hours once reserved for crises have become the standard drill. A whole generation of managers has grown up who never had a 40-hour workweek; it appears that some never will. Or will they? With their personal and family lives in smithereens or a state of perpetual postponement, what seems a substantial contingent of the formerly ambitious have begun harboring seditious thoughts about the work ethic and the all- importance of a dazzling career. Exhaustion and disillusion are setting in. Why does the job seem so demanding? It isn't just long hours or clumsy direction from above, though there's plenty of that. All sorts of pressure, from the stress of participatory management techniques to the hyperkinesia of two-career marriages to the dismay of finding your workload increasing as you near 50, just when you thought you could adopt a more dignified pace, are working together to squeeze the oomph from heretofore steely-eyed achievers. IT ISN'T just the drones at the water cooler who are thinking anew about the burden of hard work, either. It is senior executives and ambitious yuppies -- men and women who have been running flat out for years -- who have been keeping such thoughts bottled up inside for fear of appearing weak or uncommitted. ''It's a very dangerous topic,'' says management consultant Robert Paulson, director of McKinsey & Co.'s Los Angeles office. ''You'll be on an airplane and two guys sitting together are diving into their briefcases while the plane is still taking off. But dinner comes and some wine gets passed around, and the subject comes up. It's very accessible, right under the surface.'' Pierre Mornell, a San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist, addresses groups of two dozen top IBM executives on balancing work and personal life during two- week-long advanced management courses in Armonk, New York. Managers are usually stone-faced initially. ''There's a tremendous resistance to get into these personal issues,'' Mornell says. Eventually the managers' concerns rise to the surface. ''By the end of one session, everyone was talking. Many came up to me privately and said they were very troubled by 14-hour days and six- day weeks.'' Some of the heavy-laden have already bailed out. Understandably, they are the people most willing to talk about how the pressure got to them. For 18 months prior to the introduction of Steve Jobs's Next computer, Cathy Cook was responsible for fielding questions from hordes of reporters eager to learn about the secret machine. At times she would work from 7:30 in the morning to 11:30 at night, come home, and find 100 phone calls on the answering machine to review before the next day. ''I was working so hard I didn't even realize it,'' says Cook. ''People would tell me to slow down and I didn't understand what they were saying.'' Her boyfriend got fed up with her long hours and took off. She says that when she got word on the morning of a big Next media event that her mother was seriously ill, ''I had about five minutes to be upset before the phone started ringing again. You get so far into it, you don't even realize your life has gotten away from you completely.'' Last year Cook started teaching part time at a college in San Jose, in addition to her work for Next. ''It didn't let me slacken the pace,'' she says. ''But a light bulb went on. I saw there could be another aspect to my life.'' In September she enrolled at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She will return to Silicon Valley eventually, but vows to keep her life in balance. Tom Klein, 38, spent four years as a McKinsey consultant in the early 1980s, then decided to chuck the high pressure and constant travel to join Klein Bros., his family's food-processing business in Northern California. His record suggests it wasn't because he was lazy. An honors student and a Stanford MBA, he says he has always worked hard. But at McKinsey he had to race off and meet with clients whenever they wanted. ''I got tired of jumping up every time the boss said 'Let's go,' '' he explains. AND HIS NEW JOB? ''The worries are greater, but the pace is a little easier.'' When he's in the office he works just as hard as he ever did, but the hours are a lot more reasonable -- 8 to 5:30, ''and never on weekends.'' He finds he's more productive too. Klein has expanded sales of the company's nuts, raisins, and grains into overseas markets and acquired a 500-acre winery in California's Sonoma County that makes acclaimed wines under the Rodney Strong label. Still, it wasn't easy to leave McKinsey, Klein says. The internal debate over whether to go off to work for his family's little-known firm made him wrestle with his ego. ''It forced me to ask just who I am without a prestigious job title.'' A flourishing personal life more than makes up for the loss, he finds. An avid golfer and fly fisherman, he has dropped his handicap from 12 to six since he left and has fished in many of the great fly-casting streams around the world. He urges friends to get more balance in their lives, even if they don't have a prospering family business to retreat to: ''It sounds corny, but you really only get to pass through this life once. This is not a practice run.'' Not everyone shares Klein's view, of course. Interviews with more than 70 managers, consultants, psychologists, and CEOs make it clear that work is still an important source of self-esteem. There is no general movement toward the anticorporate radicalism of the 1960s. For now, millions of ambitious people are out there still eager to work incredibly hard for their companies. Bonnie Stedt, for example, an executive vice president at American Express Travel Related Services Co. Stedt, 46, works 12-hour days, Saturday mornings, and Sunday evenings. She doesn't expect others to work that hard and has no illusions about having it all. ''Of course I've missed things,'' she says. ''Friends try to call for three weeks and can't reach me.'' She is single and admits she is lonely occasionally. But she says her work, as head of human resources, is enormously satisfying. ''I have one of the best jobs in the company, with total freedom to do my job. I don't feel victimized.'' What few CEOs seem to appreciate is that not all the troops in the barracks are Bonnie Stedts. Discontent is brewing, and there may be bigger trouble ahead. According to a FORTUNE poll conducted in conjunction with this article, 77% of CEOs believe U.S. corporations will have to push their managers harder than ever in order to compete internationally. Only 9% believe that restructuring and getting leaner has resulted in pushing managers too hard. If we want to compete against the Japanese, goes this line of thought, don't we have to work the same kind of hours they do? Most CEOs appear to appreciate, intellectually at least, that companies must encourage creativity, develop better incentives, and bestow more autonomy on managers. When push comes to shove, however, they shove. Says Arnold B. McKinnon, CEO of Norfolk Southern: ''Over the last ten years or so, many companies have pushed and now they just need to keep people working as hard. You just naturally have to work harder and get rid of those people who don't.'' Perhaps, but some untoward consequences are beginning to show. The pool of highly talented people in large corporations willing to take on more work appears to be shrinking. Korn/Ferry International, the big executive search firm, surveyed 700 senior executives at FORTUNE 500 companies last year and found only 47% want more responsibility than they already have. When the question was first asked ten years ago, 58% were hungry for more chores. Says Lester Korn, the firm's chairman: ''A lot of people don't want the pressure.'' ''The best are leading the move away from overwork,'' argues Robert Kelley, a business professor at Carnegie Mellon University and an expert on corporate restructurings. ''It used to be that 60-hour workweeks gave you warrior status, but the trend is reversing. People are saying that 60-hour weeks mean something is wrong with the system or with the person.'' IN CASE YOU wonder how your father seemed to work long and hard without having his life become so crazy, rest assured that he was not necessarily made of sterner stuff than you. The problem is not longer hours so much as the amount of stress and effort packed into them. A Harvard MBA was comparing time on the job with his father, who had worked as a high-powered lawyer, and was about to conclude that the world hadn't really changed much -- until the father asked incredulously, ''You mean you don't take a nap every day after lunch?'' It would be comforting to think that the rising demands of corporate and professional life were only temporary, or that they flowed from some easily dammable source. But the reasons you don't get to curl up on the sofa in the afternoon are many and seem fairly intractable. The role of the executive has changed significantly. When baby-boomers were growing up and their dads wore fedoras, the job of a corporate executive was often relatively stable and narrowly focused. ''Institutions had a clear sense of what they did, and they did it efficiently,'' says Robert Shapiro, head of NutraSweet. ''If you made widgets, you did it again and again. You wanted conformance to norms, and you set up systems to detect deviations, and the executive was part of that process.'' This approach no longer works in the face of global competition, rapid innovation, and considerable uncertainty. ''Many of us don't know if what we're doing will be valid tomorrow,'' Shapiro says. Effective managers nowadays don't get to execute clear-cut orders from on high; rather, each manager has to understand the company's overall strategy and then improvise. Says Shapiro: ''We're demanding a lot more.'' When the strategy is missing, the demands on an executive grow intolerable. At one company a manager was told the goal for the year was market share. The next year it was improved profit margins, then new accounts, and then in the fourth year, cost cutting. ''He got top evaluations every year, but he didn't make it to the fifth year,'' says Bob Swain, co-founder of Swain & Swain, an outplacement firm in New York City. ''He couldn't bring himself to fire up the troops and head off in another direction. He quit.'' More participatory management, while an improvement, often takes more time. A boss barking orders into the phone in the old days wasn't fun for the underlings, but it was fast. Now subordinates have lots of autonomy, but the boss has to spend hours providing general direction, guiding group decision- making, and wandering around to keep an eye on things. Says Christopher York, a former top Citicorp officer and now vice president at AmBase, a financial services company: ''That increases the level of ambiguity and stress a manager has to live with.'' EVEN IF YOU survived the latest round of cutbacks, you can't breathe easy. To the contrary. The vast restructurings under way at large companies have piled on the work for those who have kept their jobs. Kim Cameron, a University of Michigan business professor who studied downsizings at 30 auto- related industrial companies in the upper Midwest, concludes that most restructurings are done badly, with little thought given to rebalancing the workload among the survivors. About two-thirds of the downsizings he studied were botched, he says: The wrong jobs were eliminated, or blanket offers of early retirement prompted invaluable managers to leave. When Cameron asked 2,000 managers at the companies about their workloads after layoffs, 47% of respondents said they were working ''a great deal'' more than two years earlier. Says Cameron: ''There's a general approach of throwing a hand grenade at a bunch of employees, and whoever survives has to do all the work there was before.'' Worse, since the survivors often don't know how to do the departeds' work, morale and productivity plummet. ''It's a rare corporation that asks about the impact of restructuring on ( individuals,'' says William Bridges, a San Francisco area consultant who helps companies eliminate layers of management. ''The CEOs say, 'We'll restructure because the company will function better,' but nobody asks about exhaustion.'' Too often, Bridges observes, the top brass declare managers will ''work smarter'' but don't offer any guidance on how to do that. Instead, says Bridges, '' 'work smarter' is usually a euphemism for 'work harder next week.' '' Technology may make you more productive, but it doesn't necessarily help you work less. Lawyers at big-name firms such as Cravath Swaine & Moore in New York City have always worked some of the most horrendous hours anywhere. Now at Cravath they work more than ever -- an average 2,300 billable hours a year, up from around 2,000 in 1960. One culprit appears to be office technology. Says Sam Butler, presiding partner at Cravath: ''We used to type up drafts of contracts on seven-page carbons, and by 9:30 at night you had to give them to the typing pool. Then you went home.'' But since the arrival of computers, lawyers can print out flawless contracts as late as they want. And now there are facsimile machines. Says Butler: ''We can print out a contract, fax it to London, and wait around until 3 A.M. when they've finished reviewing it, and we can start working on it again.'' FEW CORPORATIONS are sensitive to the stresses their managers are under, says Marilyn Puder-York, a psychologist counseling executives on Wall Street. ''Developing the proper balance is such a fine line and requires so much wisdom. I don't know if enough senior managers have experienced enough trauma in their own personal lives to be that wise.'' The danger is that corporations, especially those anxious about foreign competition or possible takeover, are asking more and more of employees just as workers are becoming less and less willing to give. Since customer service and innovativeness are increasingly important competitive weapons, it doesn't pay to create a sullen, dispirited, or burned-out work force. Some ways for corporations to turn down the heat: -- For starters, don't presume you're another Lee Iacocca, inspiring workers to joyous and extraordinary effort by the force of your dazzling personality. Carol Orsborn, co-owner of a San Francisco public relations firm, found herself disabused of this illusion in a way that wound up making her company far more productive. ''I thought I was an inspirational leader,'' she says. + ''Whenever I gave a speech on the goals of the company, I noticed everyone worked harder.'' One day, though, the workers rebelled and presented her with a list of demands for change. Says Orsborn: ''I wasn't inspiring them. It turned out they were afraid of getting fired.'' Orsborn and her husband, Dan, realized they were driving themselves and their employees too hard, so they told everyone to cut back to a 40-hour week. They got rid of half their clients, sold their Porsches, moved into a smaller house, and half expected to be out of business in a few months. ''Business boomed,'' Orsborn says. The clients they disposed of were the most exhausting ones -- ''the ones that were driving us by fear.'' Employee turnover dropped sharply, workers felt less frightened about making mistakes, ''and we discovered you could have creative ideas while you were gardening.'' Despite the shorter hours, revenues shot back to their former level in months. -- If you have to restructure, solicit employees' ideas on how to go about it. Workers are far less resentful of the added workload that often follows if they feel they had some say in what tasks they would inherit. ''People will work hard if they have a choice,'' says Michigan professor Cameron. The auto companies he studied that failed to improve efficiency three years after layoffs had piled new duties on their managers and given them no choice. ''The managers' attitude was, 'I'm working as fast as I can. I'm not going to spend more time making the company innovative.' '' -- Don't let work turn into an endurance contest. An executive at Xerox used to work all day in New York, fly all night to London and put in a full day, then fly back to New York and work all day. One joker pulling such stunts can force everyone else to do the same and drag the entire organization down. ''People can't sustain the effort,'' says a venture capitalist, who saw the phenomenon in corporate life. ''It leads to chaos, and then everybody gets addicted to the adrenalin that comes when you're battling chaos.'' Aside from a few macho fools, most workers would be delighted to end such displays of extraordinary commitment but fear looking as if they don't care about their work. ''It's like two aging gunslingers squaring off to go at it,'' says Paulson at McKinsey. ''Both of them would be happy to go off and have an ice cream soda together, but neither one wants to be the first to blink.'' Sometimes blinking works. Robin Juarez, a NutraSweet executive, declined to go along with a company practice of commencing business trips to Latin America on Sundays. A single mother at the time, she didn't feel right leaving her children on weekends. ''There was a collective sigh of relief,'' says Juarez. ''Even my boss said, 'Okay, we won't travel on Sundays.' '' -- Be flexible. The inability to pursue a sane family life is what makes most workers feel the job is too demanding. Women are the most vulnerable. Even in two-career families, women handle about 70% of the child rearing. Don't demand that all work be done at the office; reward good workers with computers and telecommunications devices so they can work at home. Charles Rodgers, vice president of Work/Family Directions, a Boston-based consulting company, says, ''A lot of people want flexible hours, not shorter hours.'' Is your company working you too hard? Odds are that it will let you work yourself silly if you choose. Wittingly or unwittingly, the brass will set up contests between managers to see who produces the most or works the longest. The company may spur contestants on by giving money or titles to the winners, but it will not tell you to stop working. Apple Computer is more sensitive than most companies to the stress that comes with overwork -- it offers massage on the premises, sponsors an equestrian club, and gives aikido lessons to help workers blow off steam. But the manager at Apple who came to work a couple of days after she gave birth last year was not sent home. The hard job of not working so hard is up to you. How to kick back without getting kicked out? You may have to approach deceleration gradually and strategically, says Puder-York, the Wall Street psychologist. One way to break the pattern of unbridled overwork is to join philanthropic or professional organizations that have been blessed by the company. Getting a seat on the National Footwear Council won't be seen by your superiors as running away from work, she says. ''You get to tell your boss you have a board meeting to attend, and that it is business-related.'' It could also provide some badly needed socialization in a more relaxed setting than work. Building up a network of contacts at other companies in your industry may boost your sense of security too; if nothing else, you've got people to call if you lose your current job.

Take up exercise on your lunch hour. Unless your boss is prepared to confess that he doesn't care if you drop dead at your desk, he can hardly argue with . your pursuit of fitness. Heading off to the gym sends a message that you're putting your own needs ahead of the company's, at least for an hour or so, and helps you establish some personal time in your day. Once it's clear that you are not available to hop every moment the boss gets a brainstorm, you could use the time for other needs -- seeing your kids at lunch, for instance. Thinking of quitting the corporate scene altogether but not quite ready to open an inn in Vermont? Consider becoming a consultant to your current employer. More and more companies are comfortable negotiating consulting contracts with employees, says Nella Barkley, head of Crystal-Barkley, a New York firm that counsels executives on career advancement. A consulting contract offers erstwhile corporate apparatchiks a steady income and a lot of flexibility, she says; they can decide how much of the time freed up they want to use going after new clients. Companies can reduce overhead costs but still engage experienced help easily during peak demand periods. ''It's a super alternative,'' says Barkley. ''My experience coaching people who do it is that their egos get a big boost. They feel in charge of their lives, and they're loaded with queries from the full-timers still on the job.'' It's often tough to recognize that you're overworking. Anything less than full effort seems immoral -- ''There's no ethic more ethical than the work ethic,'' observes economist John Kenneth Galbraith. You probably believe that you can handle overwork better than most. Says Leonard Greenhalgh, a psychologist teaching at Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School of Business: ''A typical reaction is, 'A normal person can't do all this, but I'm so talented I can.' '' IT IS EASY to forget that hard work is not inherently good or moral, but only as noble as what you're striving to achieve. Working so hard that you're a dismal parent is wrong. Working hard so you can be filthy rich is merely greedy. Working overtime because your boss is too dim to let you do meaningful, efficient work is foolish, unless you are paid handsomely for the aggravation. In case you need to kick yourself in the pants in order to slow down, try taking the simple and unnerving tombstone test: Ask yourself what you want to be known for after you've shuffled off to the Big Office in the Sky. If it's for winning an extra fraction of a point of market share for the pillowcase division in the third quarter of 1990, well, knock yourself out. If it's to / lead a great company that employs thousands, gives customers something they need, and provides shareholders with wealth for retirement, you're onto something noble. But consider that in driving yourself and others, less may be more. And if the urge is rising to become one of the great Boy Scout leaders of southwestern Iowa or the most earnest jazz clarinetist ever to screech out a tune, go do it. Making yourself a better person -- more diverse in your interests, more reflective, perhaps even more loving -- may well make you a better manager. But don't wait for your boss to get excited about the idea. Just get started. And remember that the only people who are pushed too hard are those who let themselves be pushed.