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It is self-evident that an individual's background and education have a profound impact on the career decisions he or she makes. Some of the managers indicated that the effects of early experiences and parental injunctions affect the individual's career decisions for a considerable part of their life. The evidence suggests that the majority of “high flyers” are driven by imperatives that arise before or early in their employment careers. They have much lower expectations of domestic or personal satisfaction, other than through work or the products of work. The result is that for them the point of balance is skewed away from personal and domestic achievement.

The reasons managers gave for what appeared to be overly ambitious individual career goals and, therefore, decisions about the primary importance of work and achievement at work, tended to be located in the individual's early experience, and more generally was a function of age. It was found that younger managers tended to stress the importance of work as the mainspring of their career, whereas more experienced managers tended to focus on creating a reasonable balance between what could be achieved at work and their personal and domestic aspirations.