Gregg Slager saw the clock nearing midnight, sighed, and reached for the next file. All along the 25th floor of Ernst & Young's headquarters at 5 Times Square, lights were ablaze. It was another 80-hour week for the M&A department, where Slager, a senior partner, had been in the trenches for a decade. Slager doesn't do garden-variety accounting; his unit handles due diligence on major deals in which billions of dollars (and thousands of jobs) hang in the balance. On viselike deadlines, they plow through vast piles of financial and operational data to get a fix on a business and look for danger signs. With the boom in private-equity investing, the pace only seemed to be getting more intense.  Top partners like Slager can pull down seven-figure incomes for shepherding such high-pressure deals. Yet last year, at age 45, with 4- and 6-year-old boys at home, he often found himself wondering whether the sacrifices were worth it. Vacations, he recalls, had become merely "a change of work venue." Some nights his wife, Sue, would bring the kids to his office in their pajamas so that they could spend some quality romping-around time with their dad. The young professionals Slager was trying to hold on to in his department said they wouldn't put up with the pace year after year. Something had to give.  So this year Slager did something taboo for a top performer in a world-class firm: He declared this wasn't the kind of life he and his team wanted and reached out to colleagues to change the way M&A due diligence works. Over six months, the unit rethought every job, reallocated tasksand won better lives for the due-diligence teams while providing better service for clients. Including the boss. Not that M&A will ever be a breeze, but Slager's vacations are now real. Weekend work is no longer the norm. And a manager who works for Slager says his family has stopped threatening to throw away his BlackBerry.  This isn't another tale of a conflicted working momSlager is a hard-driving man at the peak of his profession waking up to what women have shouted about for decades. "Men are willing to talk about these things in ways that were inconceivable less than ten years ago," says Howard Schultz, chairman of Starbucks (yes, he's also the world's top purveyor of corporate go-juice). The problem won't be solved just by working smarter or tinkering at the margins to add flexibility. Instead, as the E&Y team discovered, delivering better business performance while improving their lives meant rethinking the way work gets done and how consuming senior jobs need to be.  It's a lesson corporate America needs to learn before an entire generation of senior talent melts down or decides to stay home. The 60-hour weeks once thought to be the path to glory are now practically considered part-time. Spouses, kids, friends, prayer, sleeptime for things critical to human flourishing is being squeezed by longer hours at the top. Says Bill George, a self-described 60-hour man who ran medical-device leader Medtronic for a decade and who now serves on the boards of Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil, and Novartis: "It didn't use to be this intense. It got much worse starting 15 years ago, when we went to this 80-hour week." Top executives are increasingly strung out, he and others say. Service firms in consulting, law, and investment banking have built 80-hour weeks into their businesses. If it keeps up, the toll could make itself felt not only on companies but on the nation, eroding productivity growth in an era when global competition has never been more intense.  Not everyone thinks there is cause for concernor room to maneuver. Costco CEO Jim Sinegal runs a fast-paced company with an enviably low turnover rate among senior employees. He says his top managers no longer work seven days a week the way people did when he was young, which is progress enough. Retailing is too competitive to shrink senior time-on-task further, he adds (and wisecracks, "I would love to sell that concept to our competitors").  But while some CEOs assert that every time a top job opens up, a phalanx of "24/7" people is waiting in line to take it, most companies cite a shortage of talented leaders as one of their biggest constraints. Rethinking senior jobs and careers can help solve that, says Jeanie Duck of the Boston Consulting Group, who specializes in organizational change. "It's a myth that companies are filled with highly capable people who are willing to work 24/7," she says. "It's not true. The companies that crack this will have their pick of talented people."  Indeed, dozens of interviews with top executives, consultants, and researchers suggest that a revolt of talent is brewing, and that it's time to reenergize the stale "work-life" debate by starting at the top.  What will it take to make headway on this agenda? Business leaders need to do four things. First, quit defining the desire for doable jobs as a "women's issue." Men want this too. Second, start viewing efforts to humanize senior jobs as a competitive advantage and business necessity, not as one-time accommodations for the CEOs' pets. Third, realize that progress is actually possible; there are examples to show that work at the top can be retooled. Finally, make it safe within companies and firms to talk about these things. "Businesses need to be 24/7," says Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy. "Individuals don't."
Working 24/7 may seem good for companies, but it's often bad for the talentand men finally agree. So businesses are hatching alternatives to the punishing, productivity-sapping norm.