Promotion Can Kill

Washington's Advertising Club, with eager-beaver young executives chainsmoking and fidgeting in their seats, provided a perfect audience last week for Industrial Medicine-Man Robert Collier Page (TIME. May 24). Warned Page: "Chances of getting ahead in the next decade . . . are going to be many times greater than anyone has ever known . . . Opportunity for every able man and woman, from office boy to vice president, will be spelled out in letters as big as barn doors . . . There is a terrible danger hidden in [this]: unless you are up to the challenge mentally and physically, your next promotion could kill you."

As Dr. Page explained it: "Your capacity for tension has a limit beyond which it isn't safe to go ... The patterns you establish in your late 20s and early 30s largely determine your load-carrying capacities during your 40s and later. Crackups in middle life are usually the consequence of what you have accumulated or abused in your earlier years. Most crackups are needless. They are a self-invited penalty that we Americans are paying for a doubtful standard of material success. In Europe, and over most of the world, physical and mental crackups are rare, despite wars and tensions more trying than ours."

Among Dr. Page's tips for executive longevity:

P: Decide whether you enjoy responsibility, and if not, accept no more of it. It is through unwanted responsibility that a promotion can prove lethal.

P: Be sure that your work is fun at least three days a week.

P: Try "less food, less liquor and tobacco, less travel, more exercise, more leisure, planned vacations, more delegation of authority."

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