The fairy tale of excess capacity In consulting it is fashionable, sometimes even mandatory to work hard and to work excessive hours. Of course when it comes to formal documentation of the hours worked everybody is 100% compliant with German labour laws...'of course'. However the 'informal reality' often gives a different impression. The notion that anyone is capable of working more than ten hours highly concentrated on a daily basis over several days or weeks time by pure willpower is something I always considered suspicious to say the least. I witnessed a decent count of occasions of late work and night shifts, where a team had to hit a deadline for a proposal or some documents for workshops or a steering committee and so on. On these occasions I noticed two different types of colleagues: the ones that were staring holes into their laptop screens while typing and clicking away on their computers frantically and the ones that were not. You guessed it: 4 out of 5 of the...