I realised with a shock of anger this week that four of the people closest to me are burning out.

Post-Covid, burnout, like brain fog, has become a nebulous and overused cliché. The shock is that it’s real, close to home, and hits perfectly normal people hard. In this case, the four involved (I’ll call them S, C, G and D) are all in the prime of working life. They are intelligent, conscientious and creative. They have a sense of humour and like and care about other people. In short, they are people any sensible organisation would want not only to employ but to hang on to for dear life.

Even now none of them makes a fuss, and might even deny the problem. Yet each is going through a crisis manifesting in physical illness, stress, exhaustion or just disgust (one said, ‘I just don’t care any more!’).

Route maps to burnout differ according to human psychology, material circumstance and other pressures, but they all end at the same overstressed, emotionally depleted destination. The culprit is also the same: today’s impersonal, hypocritical, numbers- and money-driven management.

There has always been poisonous, mealy-mouthed management. But now it’s endemic (try this, for example). Ir’s striking that brutal targets are a consistent component and symptom of its dehumanising dysfunction. Thus, S works in a job-centre in the suburbs of Paris. Her clients are youngsters, usually of immigrant families, who are (rightly) fatalistic about their job chances and more interested in scraping together a few euros in barely legal money-making ventures than attending job-centre interviews. S is enterprising and creative on their behalf and has scored some real successes. But like her colleagues she has no hope of reaching placement and activity targets set from outside with zero regard for context or the means at her disposal. Rather than thanks, the management pressure is remorseless, leaving her depressed, doubting of her worth, and finally ill. She won’t take time off, which just tightens the vicious circle.

G, in media, is a respected journalist whose reward for successfully attracting new subscribers is to have his target doubled the following year. He could of course boost his short-term numbers by printing tabloid-style speculation and gossip (of which he knows plenty) – but at the cost of destroying the trust that won him paying followers in the first place. He despises and rejects the targets, which have left him cynical of the management. Whatever, he has arguably exploited himself (he loves his job) by burning the candle at both ends over the past few months and now finds himself with nothing left in the tank during a family crisis.

Until recently, C worked for an environmental consultancy. A manager as well as an ecologist, this summer she came under intolerable pressure from above to make the numbers that would justify the price shareholders were expecting for the sale of the consultancy to another concern, pressure that wrecked teams, relationships and livelihoods. She finally snapped. She’s undertaken a new job on a work-to-rule basis, using it to clear her head before looking for something more permanent. It’s unlikely to be in the private sector.

For D, a senior maintenance technician in a food processing plant in outer Paris, cost reduction is the constant target. As an experienced and resourceful engineer, he is relied on by senior management to act as unofficial trainer to new often graduate recruits who generally don’t stay long and are freqently paid as much as he is. He doesn’t complain, but he has been working shifts, including nights, for 20 years – far longer than is acceptable practice for mental and physical health.

After the shock comes anger. First of all for the burned-out. I think and hope that with support they’ll come through the current experience, although at varying personal cost that none of them merited. Second for us collectively. There’s enough grief already without this utterly perverse and unnecessary man-made addition of brutality and bullshit. Imagine the total cost in misery, health and therefore also money, of scaling it up to population level. Here’s the explanation why S and D, like so many of the French, can’t wait to retire as early as possible, and are taking to the streets to defend their right to do so. And when work is so nakedly contingent as well as dismally badly paid, particularly in the public sector, why wouldn’t half the British workforce go on strike?

The third stab of anger is at management and the senior managers who perpetrate this travesty. Behind the fine words, the reality is that today’s management has grown an impermeable anti-human shell, better suited to managing a prison than 21st century knowledge work. Call me cynical, but it’s hard not to think of big tech’s copy-cat recourse to mass lay-offs, now totalling 150,000, sometimes conducted by email and accompanied by ghastly ‘rank and yank’ regimes for the remainder, as payback for employees’ resistance to returning to the office after Covid. Not so secretly many employers fear and resent the human unpredictability and sometimes unbiddability of their employees; and despise the customers whom they keep at arm’s length  – anything to minimise actual contact – with an inscrutable screen of technology, and track, target and influence 24 hours a day. Caulkin’s Law predicts that ChatGPT and new-on-the-block neurotech – brain-computer interfaces – will only make this exploitation worse.

It should be beyond obvious that burning up your human assets is as self-defeating as setting light to your house to keep warm. Yet that’s what too many managements are doing, squandering human capital, anaesthetising energy and initiative and making their organisations as brittle as a twig. Look at Twitter. Or the terrible warning of our crumbling NHS, which, with voluntary resignations and stress-related absences for burnout and PTSD running at record levels, looks more and like an organisation in the throes of suicide.

Toyota’s sustainable ambition is to build cars whose emissions are cleaner than the air that goes in. In the same way, the only management that is sustainable is one that works to better the human condition, not worsen it. As Roger Martin shows, management and organisations that go against the grain of humanity won’t survive in the long term – and we human beings will be the better for it.