“To every thing there is a season,” says Ecclesiastes, “and a time to every purpose under heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die...a time to kill, and a time to heal...a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance...”

What would that gloomy old soul have to say about the life of the modern manager? “A time to work, and, er, that’s it.”

Many would see nothing wrong in this approach. Sir Alex Ferguson, the highly successful manager of Manchester United football club, is a good example. Asked last month how he felt about his latest triumph of winning the European champions league, he admitted that, of course, he would be celebrating that evening.

But: “The thing about me is that I won’t get carried away with it, and tomorrow morning I will be thinking about next season,” Sir Alex went on: “It drains away very quickly – that drug, that final moment. I will be thinking about the future and looking into the players’ eyes to make sure their hunger is still there.”

Drive, hunger, ambition: today’s workplace seems to demand more and more of such stuff.

If you are serious about getting on in your career or leading your organisation on to greater success, a strong sense of urgency is required.

Millions of TV viewers have been enjoying the latest series of the UK version of The Apprentice, which finished last week. The programme featured the now traditional array of eager, sharp-elbowed individuals who were ready to do their fellow team members down if it meant a better chance of grabbing an exciting new job which came, as the programme’s narrator kept reminding us, with a “six-figure salary” attached.

To win this prized apprenticeship you have to “front up”. Put on a good show. Create the right impression. Give a good account of yourself. These days, the ideal recruit won’t just do a really good job, but he or she will tell a good story about him/herself as well.

“You have to work on your identity today,” the distinguished sociologist Anthony Giddens told a packed seminar room at the London Business School last week. Lifestyles are now enormously diverse, he explained. We have to choose who it is we are going to be. (That other global TV phenomenon, Big Brother, proves his point. Never have so many anxious people expended so much energy at the same time in the quest to create a winning identity, or “self”.)

Lord Giddens was speaking at a half-day symposium called “Humanising Work”, held under the auspices of the Lehman Brothers centre for women in business.

In a wide-ranging talk, he considered the relationship between the highly committed, obsessive professional and the more troubling phenomena of addicts and those trapped in compulsive behaviour patterns.

New technology helps feed some people’s addiction to work. Lord Giddens joked about the hard-working types who, getting up in the night to go to the bathroom, seize the chance to check their e-mails. This presupposes that the BlackBerry is not still buzzing away on the bedside table, or under the pillow. And that said executive has even gone to bed in the first place.

Compulsive behaviour is linked to depression, Lord Giddens warned. But, he conceded, it is also linked to high achievement. Look again at that Alex Ferguson quote. Success is a drug for him, he admits. But even as he begins to plan how to achieve the next hit, he knows that the resulting pleasure will be fleeting. Funny old game, football.

Before he became a TV celebrity, Sir Gerry Robinson, the former chairman of the leisure group Granada (which merged with Carlton in 2003 to form ITV), offered an alternative model of the successful business leader.

There really are only 10 or 12 key decisions you have to get right every year, he used to say. Concentrate on them, and aim for a success rate of at least 80 per cent. Do that and all will be well.

As for the rest of the job, well, lighten up a bit. Relax. Delegate. And, like Sir Gerry, you too could be back on the golf course by Friday afternoon. Naive? Perhaps. Out of date, in today’s faster, globalised, 24/7 world? Probably. Disingenuous, given the complexity of modern business life? Almost certainly yes.

And, of course, Sir Gerry’s last few years in business have not exactly been an unqualified success. It is far easier being a TV troubleshooter than a real-live manager, who has to carry on with the work in hand after the camera crews have gone home.

Working harder and harder, doing “the wrong thing righter”, as Russ Ackoff puts it, will not lead to success. And yet, just like on the “reality” TV shows, people fight an unrelenting battle to get to and stay at the top.

“If something comes up that requires seven-day working...then I will do it,” Sir Gerry Robinson once said. “But it rarely does. I think many people just use work as a way of not confronting themselves.”

The best and most subversive question to be asked about the “long hours culture” is this: why don’t you want to go home?