When work hits home: few CEOs seem to realize that it pays to offer a balance.

Pernille Spiers-Lopez, 45, had her moment of truth about work/life balance about five years ago, when she found herself in the back of an ambulance, its lights flashing and siren wailing as it sped to the nearest hospital. Spiers-Lopez, now the president of IKEA North America, had been living

in overdrive. With a husband who worked as a middle school principal, she was raising two toddlers and holding down a demanding, travel-filled job of her own, as head of human resources for the North American branch of the Swedish furniture dynamo. "I was going and going and going," she recalls.

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Then, one day at a meeting, she realized her right arm had gone numb. By evening, she felt so ill that she feared she might be having a heart attack. As she headed to the emergency ward, her thoughts turned to realization--and regret. "I said to myself, 'So, this is success,'" she recalls. As it turned out, Spiers-Lopez had not had a heart attack, but the scare left a lasting impression. Today, she makes time for yoga and meditation, and encourages her employees to feel free to put work in its proper place.

But she is still an exception to the prevailing pattern. Although work/life balance has been on the corporate agenda for a generation now, few CEOs actually get it. "Most are giving lip service," says Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute, a work force research group in New York.

It's not hard to point to some of the objections that CEOs raise. The first is pure skepticism. Some believe work/life programs are not only expensive, feel-good initiatives with little quantifiable return, but also unworkable. Leaders of small companies have the least patience. When Donna Klein, president and CEO of Corporate Voices for Working Families, a Washington-based nonprofit organization, met with a group of owners and managers of smaller businesses on the subject, they said flexibility simply wasn't an option for anyone running line operations. And if one person was given a flexible work arrangement, everyone else would want the benefit, too.

Another factor may be the backgrounds of many corporate chiefs, whose hard-charging careers have left them without an understanding of the problem; they have little balance in their own lives, so offering that to employees is just not a top priority. And CEOs who have the financial resources for life-enhancing services like full-time nannies may be insulated from the stress faced by some employees.