How Much Is Enough?

In the world of work, the hot button today is not the IPO market, which is turning Webpreneurs into instant multimillionaires.

It's not the raging war for talent, which is leading teams of workplace wizards to put themselves up for auction to the highest bidder.

It's not the insatiable appetite for growth, which is converting productless startups into priceless R&D labs.

It's not the desperate search for greater efficiencies and for new markets, which is resulting in ever-larger combinations of old, established corporate giants.

It's not even the spiraling rewards that seem to flow to those who are brave -- or brazen -- enough to declare themselves brands, to assert their economic independence from the traditional workplace, and, in the process, to free themselves from the constraints of salary, bureaucracy, and corporate gravity.

The hot button today embraces all of those developments of modern life -- all of those developments, and more.

The hot button today is a question that hangs in the air in corporate boardrooms and at cocktail parties, in IPO road shows and at the kitchen table: How much is enough?

How much money -- to compensate you for your work? How much time -- to devote to your family? How much public glory -- to satisfy your ego? How much opportunity for private reflection -- to deepen your understanding? How much stuff is enough for you? And, no matter how much stuff you have, how do you find -- and define -- satisfaction?

These questions are hot -- though hardly new. Seventy years ago, in "Civilization and Its Discontents," Sigmund Freud wrote, "It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement -- that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life." But while the question "How much is enough?" may not be new, the velocity, the intensity, and the scale of the answers that people can choose from today are new. Choices -- in work and in life -- are coming at greater speed, from more directions, and with consequences that are more immediate and more dramatic than ever before.

In the "official" world of business, where language is often an obstacle to rich understanding and genuine emotion, the question generally gets pigeonholed as a problem for the HR department to grapple with. Companies are "family-friendly": They implement "policies and programs" that are designed to help their people "balance" work life and family life. But the real world of work is a messier place. Policies and programs seem sterile when it comes to talking about the twists and turns of the human heart, or about the intensely personal calculations that yield our tentative answers to the question "How much is enough -- for me . . . for now?"

The search for specific, textured answers to that question led us to create this issue's cover package. We begin with the results of a Fast Company-Roper Starch Worldwide online survey (conducted between April 9 and April 12 of this year) of 1,096 college-educated, employed adults. Their answers to a series of probing questions offer a window onto the complex and sometimes contradictory impulses that go into people's choices about the intersection of work style and lifestyle in the new economy.

Next we go to Canyon Ranch Health Resort, near Tucson, Arizona, where Dan Baker's Life Enhancement Center caters to hyper-achieving, hyper-stressed-out businesspeople -- fast-trackers who need a time-out to reconnect with what really matters in life.

We then talk with three authorities, each of whom has a specific line of sight into this question: Tom Morris, a philosopher who applies the lessons of history's greatest thinkers to today's search for satisfaction and meaning; Shoshana Zuboff, a teacher whose Harvard Business School course on self-discovery helps executives to envision the next stage of their life; and Elizabeth Gibson-Meier, a consultant who draws on Buddhist philosophy to enable her clients to see the many options that are available to them.

Finally, we visit Norsk Hydro, a huge Norwegian conglomerate that seeks to compete and grow by following a business model that's fundamentally different from the one that prevails in the United States: At Norsk Hydro, having "enough" both in work and in life is a source of competitive advantage -- a way to make the new economy not only exhilarating and enriching but also sustainable and satisfying.