HE WAS THE QUIET ONE IN THE corner. But as the meeting drew to a close, he asked to raise a final point. It was the evening before a three day seminar with the leadership of a very big and powerful corporate on its sustainable development strategy. It was a potentially big deal and everyone was a little tense, preoccupied by how the client – the big corporate – would take to both the programme and the bleak messages that were going to be conveyed to them to shake their complacency and (hopefully) stimulate their creative juices.

We were a bunch of consultants retained to guide the process and supplement the expert inputs. Our colleague in the corner had a serious, but surprising criticism of the organisers. “We are about to preach sustainability, but the programme is completely unsustainable. I have just counted, and we are being asked to work from 7am to 11pm, for three continuous days. That’s 48 hours out of 72, or put another way, six days work crammed into three. That is not a sustainable way to work.”