Been perusing Executive Leadership. Jaques says about our work being important:
The simple fact is that managerial organizations have become the most important of the social institutions of the modern free enterprise democratic society.
Consider their impact. In the economically developed nations anywhere from 75% to over 90% of those who work for a living, do so for a wage or salary in employment in a managerial hierarchy. They spend 40 hours every week, for 30 to 50 years. The different economic wealth of families is distributed mainly by the salary system.
Nearly everyone’s career is fixed by employment opportunities and the goodness or badness of judgments of managers. And we are talking of lifetimes — for over 125 million people and their dependents [in] the USA, 30 million in the UK and in France, and hundreds and hundreds of millions of others throughout the rest of the world…