Executive Stress

I HOPE that the first point I want to make about executive stress has also been made, equally emphatically. by my colleagues who are also contributing to this issue. It is, of course, that "executive stress" is no different from maternal stress, geriatric stress, boilermakers' stress, and so on. Because we live in an age of classification we are happy when we can tie a label on to something and, having done this and filed it away, we tend to think that we can happily leave it there. Stress is now a fashionable word, and we have convinced ourselves that we are, all of us, living in stressful times. Maybe we are, but this does not absolve us from the responsibility of doing something about it.