Thirty years into the sexual revolution, sexual politics are bigger news than ever. President Clinton's involvement with a White House intern is testing the boundaries of the US constitution and has threatened to catapult him out of office; the public fascination with Princess Diana has led the British royal family to review the way it does business. Viagra, sexual harassment suits, abortion, Aids research, rising divorce statistics all testify to the fast pace of social change.

Surprisingly, no one has asked the world's leading businessmen for their thoughts on these developments - as if there were a mysterious divide separating "lifestyle issues" from "the financial world".

So I set out to interview some chief executives. On the agenda: what do multinational bosses think about recent social changes and how do they affect corporations? How do chief executives believe business leaders should behave in their private lives? Must a man be a "perfect family member"? Will women be successfully integrated into top management? What will the 21st century boardroom look like?

Multinationals are coming to dominate not just work life but also cultural life in the way that the nation state has, first as an idea and then as political reality, since the 16th century. As unelected bodies, in effect fiefdoms, (belong to one, and you receive health insurance, old age benefits, and social status) their values are crucial to the way society develops - whether along fundamentalist religious principles (women at home, men at "Serious Work") or along secular lines based on equality and human rights.

The 18th century revolutions that created our political system, democracy, left an unstable situation behind by initially denying women basic voting and property rights, thereby entrenching their status as a disenfranchised group.

It is only in the late 20th century that the discrepancy in status between men and women is being addressed, as the ongoing revolution in private life has made the leap from the bedroom into the boardroom.

Corporate leaders are thus trying to resolve two tough issues: the successful integration of women into the top layer of a corporate structure without undermining elite male staff; and defining the boundaries of personal freedom for the male executive.

These two challenges for a chief executive are intertwined. There is the dilemma, for example, of whether to promote a woman to a top job. If he does, he may court gossip and controversy; if he doesn't, then he has to face himself every day, knowing that a qualified and deserving colleague has been denied promotion because of his insecurity.

Laurenz Fritz, formerly chairman and chief executive of Alcatel, now Austria's industry minister, told me about his experience. "At Alcatel there were no women in the upper ranks or on the board. I changed that but it was a complicated business. I had to live with the cliche and the accusations but the woman went through it and today she is still with the company. It takes courage but it is important to do it.

"Why did I want a woman on the board? Women have different mental abilities from men. They think with both sides of their brain and companies need that.

"To avoid any rumours I left the job of finding someone to a headhunter. They found a woman who was so good she just had to be taken on; no one could find a reason not to accept her. Still, she had to prove she was the right choice. She was well qualified, experienced. It was not easy for her in the beginning, she was very exposed; everyone was looking at her, waiting for her to make a mistake.

"It was strange for her because she knew it was me who had asked for a woman and she probably felt a certain affinity towards me because of this. She was seen as my protege. We had to go out of our way to show that there was no special relationship between us. Eventually people accepted this.

"Some men need to rethink their options with women. There is more than one type of relationship possible between a man and a woman. How a man grows up could affect his policies about women in the corporation. He could still be living with old patterns, which say that a woman is for sex, reproduction or seduction. Or he could understand that there can be many kinds of relationship between the sexes."

In a culture in which there has been faint acceptance of friendship between women and men - a world that prepares us only for father-daughter, mother-son, wife-husband or lover, or possibly brother-sister relationships - it is proving difficult for men and women to evolve together at work.

The integration of women into the larger world always brings forth, for example, the cliche that there is no such thing as friendship, there is always a sexual undercurrent or attraction between a woman and a man.

Only two or three years ago, drifting off to sleep on an aircraft on the way to some business meeting, an executive might read about Madonna, vaguely muse about her personal life, reassuring himself that it had nothing to do with him. "Ah, the sexual antics of artists . . ." zzzzzzz. Today, the same person could be confronted with the headline: Sexual Interlude With White House Intern Leads to President's

Impeachment. The brain whizzes. What if such standards of behaviour were applied to the heads of global corporations?

Perhaps they need not worry. The rules of behaviour for people in "high places" may be changing. The growing number of people living on their own (perhaps as many as half the population of western cities now live as "single"), together with increasing divorce rates sugggest that, for many people, traditional family structures are no longer attractive.

People's lives often do not follow the "rules" - exactly - and even when they do shelter under the carapace of family life, they may not live up to the values that society imposes as "normal" and "good". President Clinton is simply the most visible example of this.

Today, at the end of the century, almost everyone is involved in an inner dialogue, rethinking their private values and lives, whom they live with and why. The combination of sexual issues with hard news is not a passing aberration; it is part of the world's attempt to integrate sex and politics, women and work.

Corporate press officers try to maintain the line that "private life is outside of work. We don't care what our people do when they are not working." But this is not the whole truth and chief executives are restructuring both their companies and their attitudes. As one put it: "To make use of the best talent around, attitudes need to be changed."

The revolution in private life has so far included the right to divorce, be single, have equal partnership in marriage. Women want equality and justice both at work and at home. Men want to live with more choices about their personal lives than in the past.

Conventional wisdom holds that this "secular" system of private life (right to divorce, contraception, etc) is "less moral" than "traditional family values" but the opposite seems true. It seems to me that people are trying to develop more moral private lives. The system we have had since the democratic revolutions of the 18th century was not particularly "moral"; it put men and women at odds, unnecessarily, since it was founded on basic injustice, inequality.

Men, as well as women, have complained about their private lives, instinctively feeling that something was wrong; too often men wound up feeling like guilty beasts around women. But it's not men who are at fault, it's a faulty moral and social system - which many people are trying to remedy. If the changes succeed, eventually we can have a higher level of moral integrity for private life. Problems in relationships, private and corporate, will be solvable.

Not only have women revolutionised their identity in the family; men, too, have gone through a metamorphosis. They see themselves differently from the way men were in the 1950s and 1960s. Executive culture - designed for a world of men married with children, wives staying at home and taking care of them - is also changing as businesses increasingly reflect advances in social thinking.

Juan Villalonga, chief executive of Spanish Telecom, told me: "Telefonica, recently privatised, is in the process of a huge cultural change, like the rest of Spanish society. Our objective is to create value for our shareholders; customers come first. Therefore we need a highly motivated group of people. In this context, the changes in family structure and composition, especially the changes in women's place in society, play a crucial part in our decisions about hiring.

"We are hiring a lot of young women with MBAs. More than 50 per cent of people leaving universities with MBAs are women. Their grades at university are better than men's. But getting women into the upper stages of management is very slow because in Spain women have not been in these positions, so we don't have an existing pool of talent at the executive level from which to recruit.

"We are starting now and we hope that in a few years there will be many women at the top. We don't believe in quotas; we just want the best qualified person for the job. In our experience women are less interested in office politics or status symbols - cars and titles - and more concerned with gaining satisfaction from their work, than men. This makes them better employees.

"As men, we don't know how to react to the change in women's status vis-a`-vis us. We are trying to come to terms with it. Generally, Spanish men are not yet ready to take an equal place with women at work nor to have an equally important working wife. But that is coming. The state of marriage and personal life is changing.

"In the abstract I think traditional marriage has developed through stages. First, there was polygamy, the woman at home and the man with others, then free love and now women have the possibility to share experiences with other people in the workplace. This changes everything about the psychological arrangement within the couple.

"Today a woman living with a partner may come to us and say, 'Could you also find a job for my boyfriend/ husband here?' We try to do this so they can stay together. We want them to be happy. It is hard to be happy when you have to figure out night by night who to spend time with, who to go out with and so on."

Mike Wilson, chief executive of J. Rothschild Assurance, the life assurance group, commented: "We can't go back to the days when women's main job was pressing men's shirts. Today family values means different things to different people. We need women to work. It is not reasonable to hold women back. We should encourage women in their careers, more women (in business) would be good for everybody.

"At the same time male business leaders can find it increasingly difficult to make their personal lives conform to old stereotypes of 'the perfect family' and long-term 'stability'. The world has changed - and they have changed.

"Men today are not the same as their grandfathers: they have different ideas of who they are and who they want to be. They have seen James Bond, the Beatles and Bob Dylan - and the Spice Girls. They want to feel they are with the times but still legitimate citizens in terms of family responsibilities. They don't want to be 'loners' with no family or personal life but they don't want to be tied down by old definitions of 'the family' either.

"The macho attitude is, 'Your personal life should not affect your business life.' But the truth is an individual's personal life does affect business. So if someone is having a difficult time he should say to his colleagues, 'Look if I'm not on the ball in the next few days or weeks, it's because I'm going through this and this situation.' People feel it's a weakness to admit anything like this, even to change or be unsure about emotional life or be disturbed. But it's a strength to change; no one has a smooth ride throughout their life. Everybody faces these situations sometimes. It is useless to pretend everything is fine all the time."

Jean-Jacques Gauer, chief executive officer of Leading Hotels of the World, when asked about 'family values', quipped: "What are 'family values' really? For most executives today, there are two families, a work family and a private family, with whom you spend much less time: one hour in the morning when you are in a bad mood and one hour at the end of the day when you are dead tired. This can make for a tumultuous day."

Then he added, more seriously: "We have had many cycles and fads - sexual liberation, the Beatles, the 1960s, drugs, Aids, etc. After all these waves of behaviour, it's only normal that some traditional values come back. Parts of traditional values and parts of liberal values are good; individual freedom to move, to think for oneself, is the good thing we learned in the 1960s and 1970s and the positive value to take forward.

"The 1980s and 1990s with their focus on 'family values' can be good if we take this to mean actively caring for other people, thinking about others, not a focus on the idea that the only good way people can live is 'daddy-mummy-children'. After all, a family can be two friends."

Many of the men I spoke to, especially those with daughters, wanted to talk about women inside corporate management and felt worried, even guilty, that the outlook for them was not yet as positive as for their male peers.

Several stressed that women should be promoted but it worried me when they said: "Don't worry, we're hiring young ones now, then they'll move up." They may be overlooking qualified women around them now. One wonders if this is a pretext for not allowing more women into the boardroom and facing the challenge head-on. In Japanese corporations, for instance, women are generally expected to get married and leave work by their late-20s, thus bypassing any possibility of promotion and leaving male domination intact.

Some executives are trying to change things, though I'm not sure that their solutions will work without more understanding of what blocks women's progress up the career ladder. Too often the view, expressed with some resignation, seems to be that women inevitably "pay the price" in career terms for having children and for taking time off to raise them.

Women themselves may lack enthusiasm for the corporate world, so I recommend that wherever there is a think tank there should be a woman putting the case for flexible working, career breaks, job shares and all the other options that mean companies can retain and develop the expertise of their female staff.

I am grateful to the chief executives who have shared their thoughts on these subjects with me. Finding answers to these pressing issues holds the key to women's future happiness and men's personal self-esteem and confidence.

I believe the opinions reported here will be beneficial in forming a new consensus, sorting out where we want to go, both as corporate cultures and as a society, while opening up new avenues for thinking.

If we take some of the ideas and experiences of each chief executive we can come up with a cocktail of ideas for how to improve the mix of men and women in corporations - and life. Here's to the new corporate culture.

* To pre-register for a signed copy of Shere Hite's new book, Sex and Business, visit this website address: www.ftmanagement.com/sexandbusiness

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