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One of my favourite movies of recent months is Michael Clayton, in large part because of Tilda Swinton’s mesmerizing performance as the chief counsel turned CEO in waiting for a vast agribusiness conglomerate.

There’s a scene in which her character is rehearsing for an interview, alone in her hotel room and crafting her responses so her carefully managed persona will seem authentic and spontaneous. The hardest question to fake is the one about leading a balanced life, which of course she does not. In an inspired moment she stumbles over the answer and comes up with this:

When you are really enjoying what you do, who needs balance? There’s your balance.

Behind her response is a truly broken person (and as we discover, one who’s about to meet head on the consequence of her lack of balance). But still, it’s a tricky thing to wrestle with, what balance really means.

I have workaholic tendencies, in part because I don’t want Alec Baldwin’s set of steak knives (I don’t want a Cadillac, either, but you get the picture). But it’s also because the plans we have for our business are ambitious and require us to execute in a timeframe that cannot be anything other than compressed.

But I’m also a believer that it’s not about creating a sweatshop. Instead, as Danielle likes to say, it’s about maximizing, getting five things finished in one hour when others would take two, and most of all focusing on achievements rather than tasks. Often there’s no way around putting in long hours in a start up, but equally often businesses don’t succeed because the team doesn’t understand what’s important and what’s not in the vast spectrum of things you could do but will never have the time and resources to cover.

So in the end I think the most important thing for any CEO is to provide that context to each person: how is their job, the list of things they have to get done, relevant to the overarching goals we have for our business, and how will they know if what they’re doing’s working or not.