When engineers talk about “asset integrity”, what they usually refer to is the good practice of servicing and repairing equipment before it breaks. Companies that use a lot of machinery take this very seriously; companies that mostly just use people rarely do.
Although to my knowledge no other nation than Japan has a word for death by overwork — karoshi — we probably need one. For while it is tempting to imagine the phenomenon is unique to Japan, it may simply be that it is the first country to look deeply enough to identify it. Coined in the 1970s, the word returned to Japanese newspapers last month when the Tokyo Labour bureau ruled that the suicide of Matsuri Takahashi, a young employee of the advertising agency Dentsu, had been caused by overwork. She had worked 105 hours of overtime in a single month.
Most of the chief executives I know — predominantly in the US and UK — routinely work a 12 or 15-hour day, six or seven days a week. Few of them are familiar with studies that routinely show that productivity is not linear. After about 40 hours a week fatigue sets in, provoking mistakes. Any extra hours spent are needed to clear up the mess: reversing poor decisions, soothing ruffled feathers. The classic, but comic, expression of this was produced by the efficiency expert, Frank Gilbreth. He found he could shave faster if he used two razors but then wasted all the time he saved covering the cuts with plasters.