Business guru Rob Parsons believes we need to expose the myth that the longer you stay in the office, the more successful you will be, writes Arminta Wallace

Top civil-service appointments don't often make the headlines, but when the new permanent secretary of Britain's Department for International Development was unveiled last month, he found himself at the centre of a furore. At 42, Suma Chakrabarti is the youngest permanent secretary ever appointed in Whitehall. He is also the first Asian to reach such a senior position in Britain. Neither fact caused the uproar. So what did?

As a report in the Guardian put it, Chakrabarti "has agreed with the secretary of state, Clare Short, that he will work from 9.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. five days a week. The arrangement also allows the 42-year-old to spend every other Friday working at home in Oxford". The tone is one of mild outrage. It's as if the man had demanded that vintage champagne be piped into his office or freshly squeezed dancing girls be supplied each afternoon.

We live in a world in which long working days are regarded not as an aberration but as the norm. There was a time when 9.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m., Monday to Friday, would have added up to a respectable working week. Nowadays, anyone with any kind of ambition in the corporate marketplace has to swim against a rising tide of early mornings, late nights and working weekends.

Is all this work worth it? No, says a new book from the best-selling business guru Rob Parsons. For the past 20 years, Parsons has been travelling the world, giving seminars on business and family issues. He has seen the imbalance between work and life increase to a point at which, he says, it causes more problems than it solves. Not only is it destroying people's quality of life, it's not even productive, in monetary terms.

"It might be justifiable if it were necessary - and, OK, some people do need to work long hours some of the time," he says. "But stress-related illness is costing industry about £5.6 billion sterling a year. It dwarfs trade disputes, and a lot of it is about pressures at home. I say to businesses: 'Don't ask people to leave their home troubles at the office door - you may as well ask them to leave their left leg there.' "

Parsons's last book, The Sixty Minute Father, was an international best-seller. Clearly, there was no shortage of businessmen - and businesswomen - who felt they could benefit from its tips on how to get the work-life balance right, particularly where children were concerned. His new book, The Heart Of Success: Making It In Business Without Losing In Life, identifies a social category Parsons calls the new poor: people who have high standards of living, with kids at the best schools, second homes in the country, several holidays a year, membership of fitness clubs and all the rest.

"But alongside all this is a hurried, hassled lifestyle that in spite of massive help - au pairs, fast food, daycare facilities and a myriad of other services - means that the time pauper never quite manages to stay in front," he writes. "The latest perk in some of the large London City institutions is a 'lifestyle manager'. According to the publicity they 'cater for high-powered executives who are too busy to organise their lives outside work'. They promise to tend every need from walking the dog to organising a wedding."

Half a century ago, science- fiction writers and futuristic films were predicting that, come the 21st century, work would take up just a fraction of our highly mechanised lives, leaving acres of space for leisure activities. Instead, the opposite has happened. The dotcom explosion of the 1990s inspired a plethora of tales of computer programmers sleeping at their desks and living on an in-house diet of Coke and fast food. Add the wildly over-the-top success stories of the information-technology boom and an urban legend was born.

The myth that the longer you stay in the office, the more successful you will be has, says Parsons, embedded itself in corporate culture.

"Recently, I spoke to a young lawyer in the City of London who works regularly until one or two in the morning, and I asked him what it's like. He said: 'Well, it's not too bad. You can send out for any meal you want, and there's a room with a television and a Sony PlayStation, so we can have a break.' I thought he was joking, but in fact he was articulating what has become a lifestyle.

"Another lawyer, a woman, said to me: 'We daren't go home at five o'clock. Even if all the work's done, we have to stay till about nine and go home looking weary.' She said: 'If anyone in our office asks you how you're feeling, you never say fine, you say shattered.' It's like kids in the playground. We're all aware of peer pressure among teenagers, but it doesn't come anywhere near the power of peer pressure in the office."

But now, it seems, people are beginning to rebel - including Chakrabarti, with his insistence that a "normal" working week be written into his contract. "Yes," says Parsons, "and, you know, what's absolutely fascinating is what Tony Blair's spokesman said about it. They commended him for it, and said they wanted to judge him on his achievement and not by the standards of the jacket-over-the-chair culture.

"I wouldn't be surprised if it's a bit of a watershed, because we need new leaders in business who don't say, 'Tell me how long you work,' but, 'Tell me what you get done.' I think what has been exposed is the macho image, with very insecure leaders - mostly men, to be honest - who are trying to prove themselves by working long hours which aren't actually necessary."

Parsons believes women have a significant role to play in breaking the mould, both by pushing for flexible hours and by refusing to play the long-hours game.

"One woman I know says that if her children are ill, or she has to slip off at 3.30 p.m., she almost feels she has to make up some excuse, which is ridiculous, because she's achieving all that her male colleagues are, but still she feels this tremendous guilt. Of course, at the other end you have women who are determined to beat the men at their own game, by showing that they can work harder and longer and still have it all.

"The truth is, you can't really have it all. You can have quite a lot, but if you're in one place you can't be somewhere else. If your son or daughter keeps asking you to go along to their football match or school play, and you keep saying, 'Sure I will - next time,' then eventually they'll stop asking. And that's when you've got a problem."

Like many self-help books, The Heart Of Success uses an irritating narrative device, in this case involving an unhappy student who pours out his troubles to a man he thinks is the college janitor, only to discover he's a highly regarded professor. Twee structure aside, the book is full of eye-opening stories about current business practice, including one about a high-flying financial consultant whose job specification includes a guarantee that, wherever he is in the world, his company will fly him to Paris every Friday by 4 p.m. to be with his children - and leave him alone, without even a call on his mobile, until 8 p.m. on Sunday.

But isn't the book's new definition of success, characterised on the one hand by a fulfilling life outside the office and on the other by greater satisfaction at work, a contradiction in terms? Not at all, says Parsons.

"If you give people lives outside the office they're sharper, they're more creative and they're better at dealing with clients and customers. In fact, the big brewery company Bass recently sent a note to its legal advisers saying that it didn't want lawyers who had worked more than 50 hours a week to work on its account. In other words, it was prepared to pay £300 sterling an hour, but not for jet-lagged, life-lagged drones."

• The Heart Of Success is published by Hodder & Stoughton, £6.99 in UK

If you recognise the following danger signs, says Parsons, your work-life balance may be seriously out of kilter:

• You work longer hours than anybody else.
• You resent colleagues who work fewer hours than you do.
• You are often irritable, headachy or exhausted.
• You are often ill on holiday.
• You go out for dinner in your business clothes.
• You are furious if the car in front of you doesn't move away from traffic lights quickly enough.