Unquestioned

The most important number in your company was picked in 1926

A hundred years ago this month, Henry Ford made the five-day workweek permanent at his Detroit plant.

He didn't invent it. He didn't test it in a lab. He didn't run a pilot, commission a study, or benchmark it against competitors. He looked at his factory, looked at his market, and made a bet: that rested workers would build better cars and that workers with a free Saturday would buy them.

The bet worked. The schedule stuck. And for a century, almost nobody has seriously asked whether it still should.

Think about that for a moment. The structure that governs when 67% of American men and 57% of American women show up, log on, take meetings, eat lunch, and clock off — was set by one industrialist, in one industry, for one economic moment. It wasn't handed down by the Romans, it isn't in any holy book and nobody sat down to calculate the optimal ratio of work to rest for human flourishing. It was a competitive move by a car company in 1926.

And then we built our entire economy around it.

Schools. Childcare. Commuter rail. Retail hours. Pension contributions. Health insurance. Mortgage qualification. The phrase "working week." All of it scaffolded onto a number Henry Ford picked when the workforce was 20% female, an hour of labour produced a predictable output, and nobody could email you after dinner.

This is not a newsletter telling you to adopt a four-day week. Plenty of organizations shouldn't — at least not yet, and not as their first move. What this newsletter is asking you to do is something harder: question the default. Because as AI rewires what an hour of knowledge work actually produces, the conversation about working time is going to happen whether leaders are ready for it or not. The only question is whether you'll lead it or inherit it.

Here are six questions worth asking yourself with this month 🚀

1. What are you actually buying when you buy an hour?

In 1926, Ford could draw a straight line from a worker's hour to a car part. An hour was an output. That's no longer true for most of the people reading this.

The average knowledge worker now spends 103 hours a year in unnecessary meetings, 209 on duplicative work, and 352 just talking about work (Asana, Anatomy of Work Index). Eighty-eight percent say they're falling behind on time-sensitive priorities. The hour is still on the clock. The output isn't.

So when you defend "the hours", what exactly are you defending? The presence? The optics? The pattern? Or the value that used to be inside them?

2. Who actually benefits from "the way we've always done it"?

The five-day week was radical in 1926. It is conservative in 2026. The same structure that liberated workers from 100-hour weeks a century ago now hides a different problem: in dual-income households, total household working hours have nearly doubled since Ford's era, and mobile devices have made the workday porous in both directions.

"The way it's always been" is not neutral. It is a choice, one that benefits some stakeholders more than others. Worth asking: in your organization, who would lose something if working time changed? Who would gain? And are those the people you most want to retain?

3. What is your AI strategy assuming about time?

Most AI rollouts are sold internally on a promise of more. More output, more throughput, more capacity, more reach. Almost none are sold on less. Less meeting time. Fewer working days. A shorter week.

If AI genuinely delivers the productivity gains it's pitched on, and none of that gain is returned to the workforce as time, your people will notice. They've noticed before. Between 1973 and 2013, productivity rose 74% while real wages rose 9% (Economic Policy Institute). That gap is part of why 47% of workers globally now fear losing their jobs to AI in the next five years (PwC).

If the only thing your AI strategy promises employees is "you'll get to do more", don't be surprised when they don't help you implement it.

4. Is leisure a cost on your books, or a capability?

Ford's most-quoted line on the subject is worth re-reading: "It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either 'lost time' or a class privilege."

A century later, leisure is still treated by most organizations as the absence of work — the inverse of productivity, a line item to be minimized. But research on innovation, recovery, creativity and burnout points the other way. Rested people make better decisions. Burned-out people make more meetings.

The four-day-week pilots running in dozens of countries aren't measuring laziness. They're measuring whether structured time off makes the working hours that remain more valuable. That's a very different question from "do people want a day off." (Of course they do.)

5. What experiment could you run that doesn't bet the company?

The interesting move isn't "go to four days on Monday." The interesting move is to find one team, one quarter, and one honest measurement and run the test.

Hundreds of organizations have. They've trialled 9-day fortnights, focused Fridays, meeting-free days, half-day "AI internships" for capability building, and outright four-day pilots. Some worked. Some didn't. The ones that worked share something in common: they treated working time as a variable, not a constant. They asked what work actually needed to happen, automated or eliminated what didn't, and gave the reclaimed time back — visibly — to the people doing the work.

The ones that didn't work tended to skip the middle step.

6. If the structure were invented today, would you choose it?

This is the question we'd most encourage you to sit with.

If a consultant walked into your office tomorrow and proposed a brand-new working pattern, five fixed days, eight-ish nominal hours, blurred evenings, blurred weekends, calibrated to a 1920s assembly line and a single-earner household, would you sign off on it? Would your board?

If the answer is no, that doesn't automatically mean you should change. Plenty of inherited things are worth keeping. But it does mean the burden of proof has flipped. The five-day week stopped being self-evidently correct the moment you'd hesitate to design it from scratch.

What To Do Next

You don't have to take a position on the four-day workweek to take this seriously. You just have to stop treating working time as a fixed input and start treating it as a strategic one.

Three places to start:

• Audit one team's week. Where does the time actually go? If you can't answer in real numbers, that's the answer.

• Pick one assumption — about hours, days, presence, or pace — and test whether it still earns its place.

• Ask your people, not your peers, what they would change if they could. Their answers are almost always more useful than the benchmark report.

P.S. The conversation about working time is going to happen at your organization. The question is whether it happens on your terms — designed, measured, and tied to your AI strategy — or whether it shows up reactively in exit interviews and engagement scores.

That is what our team works on. We help leaders move from defending the calendar to redesigning it: tying working-time strategy to AI rollout, workforce data, and the real shape of how value gets created inside your organization.

No vanity pilots. No copy-paste four-day-week templates. Just a plan built around how your people actually work, and what's actually possible.

If you're ready to lead the conversation instead of inheriting it, click here to explore our approach.

💬 Every revolution starts with a conversation.

What's yours?