For most directors, work needs to represent a fat slice of our work-life balance for life to feel good and fully spent. Work is a key means by which business and social entrepreneurs make a difference. Work is not, as it is often painted, a socially divisive straight-jacket, restricting what would otherwise be an idyllic life of copious consumption and blissful relaxation. It is not our enemy, it is our loyal friend, and I for one refuse to apologise for spending so much time with it, no matter how politically incorrect this view has become.

I'm not sure how we in Europe ever allowed ourselves to blame work for societal exhaustion and all its ills. While we have always disincentivised work by the use of income-based taxation, it is only recently that we have begun to actively legislate against it with instruments like the Working Time Directive and the minimum wage. The fact that our political classes have an unhealthy disdain for the processes of value creation is now well and truly out of the bag. Just as the decline of the Roman empire was catalysed by the comfort-inducing war/wine balance, so we seem destined to be dragged to our economic knees by the Europe-wide extrapolation of the French work/lunch balance.

In the face of legions of the economically eager workers from China and India, all seemingly ready to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week for mere crumbs, only the French could come to the considered view that working beyond 35 hours a week is so potentially damaging to national interests that it should be outlawed. Intellectual extrapolations are no match for the truth.

Here in the UK, various pressure groups tell us that work keeps fathers from their children, rips mothers from the family home, and has induced an epidemic of exhaustion to which is attributed every life sapping middle-class ailment from "Crackberry" addiction to sexual disinterest.

But is the solution really more family-friendly policies in the workplace, better flexibility, and more duvet days? What next? A government health warning above the office door: "Abandon balance all ye who enter"?

Whatever happened to hard work forming the essential foundation of a fulfilling life journey? Without sacrifice, our capacity for joy is inevitably diminished; and without earning what you consume, any deep sense of fulfilment will remain illusory. Despite being healthier, wealthier and better educated than ever before, we are not immune to significant challenge.

Not everyone seeks the big life with the huge house, the oversize car, the super-size mortgage and school fees to match. But too many of us do succumb to the lie that we are owed more than we are fully prepared to earn and pay for, that we can have it all, and therefore that there are no costs to the choices we each make.

If we choose to blow spare cash on shopping and holidays, the "human" costs are most likely to materialise as the need for a double income and less time at home. And if we choose to commute for two hours to get the money or job we've always dreamed of, then the cost is often paid in the form of extreme tiredness at the weekends.

None of this is the fault of our work, or even caused by our work, although we often feel the need to blame someone other than ourselves for the results of our choices, revealing an apparent inability to know or accept our personal limits.

Work and life are in large part the same things and can't be balanced off against one another like opposite sides on the scales of personal justice. As directors, of course, we need to take sensible decisions about how best to run our companies in order to keep and retain the best people. But in doing so we should remember that by and large, we no longer operate oppressive industrial mills and our best employees are more attracted by passionate leadership than they are those extra duvet days.

We need to stand full-square against the continual devaluation of endeavour, sweat and elbow grease in the workplace, or our grandchildren are going to pay a heavy price for our political correctness.