Hello, and welcome to Working It,
I’m Emma Jacobs, standing in for Isabel (don’t worry, she’ll be back next week😎).
Do you feel the back-to-school vibe? Even before kids, I used to feel excited at this time of the year. Advertisements for new pencil cases, heralding the start of the academic year, had an energising and Proustian effect. (Helped by a new pair of autumn boots). It’s traditionally been a chance to start on new projects.
This year, a stressful summer has rendered me the opposite of revived (knackered, even) for the September return. I can’t be the only one. Countless B-team members will have been furiously working over the summer period, filling in for your boss (discussed in a column below). Or parents juggling patchwork childcare in the holidays with work? If this is you, I recommend a day off in the middle of the working week (a fraction of a minibreak for one). I might even take my own advice.
Whatever your energy levels, I hope you will find something in this newsletter to spark your interest.
Thanks for reading.
Inside the mind of a tortured genius
Readers had an early treat this week when the Weekend’s Lunch with the FT was published on Monday. Gillian Tett had a compelling interview of Walter Isaacson, whose biography of Elon Musk is causing quite a stir.
In the interview, Isaacson makes the case that Musk’s “demons are also his inspirational angels” — his dark side (“manic mood swings and deep depressions and risk-seeking highs”) is also responsible for his successes. These, the biographer says, are due to the “pain of [Musk’s] childhood” including a rocky relationship with his father and growing up in apartheid-era South Africa.
Isaacson buys into the potent idea that genius has as much to do with someone’s flaws as their merits. In her review of the biography, Rana Foroohar refers to the view of Steve Jobs (the subject of another of Isaacson’s books): “The people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do.”
Every time I read accounts of such characters (entrepreneurs, politicians, artists), I feel a frisson of irritation. For starters, they are usually male. There is far less tolerance for aggressive or impetuous women.
The mythology gives leeway to shoddy behaviour in the workplace in the name of genius. For every successful explosive entrepreneur, there will be a myriad of pound-shop wannabes acting like jerks.
It is also subjective. As Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic wrote in his book, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It): “Traits like overconfidence and self-absorption” might be seen as starlike behaviour when they should be seen as “red flags”. Which character defects are excusable — and which should we tolerate — for the sake of a greater goal?
Then there is the impact on everyone else. A genius may be given to rages, or impetuous decision-making, which can weigh heavy on others: staff may quit or feel demotivated.
The darkness in Musk’s upbringing is hardly unusual. The older I get, the more people I interview as part of my job, the more I appreciate how complicated and messy life is.
But the more we learn about tortured geniuses, perhaps the greater our understanding of the problems. This was underscored by Craig Wright, author of The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit — Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness. At the start of a course on genius at Yale, he asked students, how many would like to be one? Three-quarters of the class put their hands up. In the final class he asked: “‘Having studied all these geniuses, how many of you still want to be one?’ Now, only about a quarter of the group said: ‘I do.’ As one student volunteered: ‘At the beginning of the course, I thought I did, but now I’m not so sure. So many of them seem like obsessive, self-centred jerks.’”
This week on the Working It podcast
We had a full tent for our panel on “Mid-life career change: from profit to purpose?” at the FT Weekend Festival earlier this month. Catch up on the best of the discussion with the Working It podcast episode that producer Mischa Frankl-Duval crafted from the live event.
Among the panellists was career-changer Ana Baillie, a former professional and financial services lawyer who is now training as a midwife. Her inspiring personal story was complemented by experts Camilla Cavendish, FT columnist and author of Extra Time: Ten Lessons for an Ageing World, and Jan Hall, founder of leadership consultancy Number Four, and co-author of Changing Gear, a book for people in career and life transition.
Add in some brilliant questions from the audience — including someone who has become a teacher with our former colleague Lucy Kellaway’s Now Teach scheme — and you have a great listen. Let us know what you think!
Office therapy
The problem: My workplace recently had an office reorganisation. I have been moved to a different area, and have lost my lovely desk with a view, and natural light. I am fuming but can’t do anything about it. My husband thinks I’m being pathetic. What do you advise?
Emma’s response: I too have moved one whole floor up in the FT’s recent London office reshuffle. A lot of work goes into pulling off this complex jigsaw. Office managers try to please as many staff as possible but inevitably some will be upset. In a general trend towards hot-desking, an actual desk is a win.
I asked my former deskmate, Michael Skapinker, an FT contributing editor and careers counsellor, to weigh in:
“Of course you’re upset,” he says. “You had a sun-filled workspace with a lovely view. Now you’ve lost it. It’s as if, as a child, your parents had suddenly moved you from your bright and cheerful room into a cramped and poky one. But here’s the difference: your parents loved you, or at least we hope so. Your organisation, whatever its HR bromides, doesn’t love you. It exists to further its own interests and secure its future. It’s not personal; just business.”
Though he points out that in the hybrid world, “you may need this new desk less than you think”.
Got a question, problem, or dilemma for Office Therapy? Think you have better advice for our readers? Send it to me: [email protected]. We anonymise everything. Your boss, colleagues or underlings will never know.
Five top stories from the world of work
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Employers and staff seek truce on office working: Musk is also known for his strong views on remote working (against). So it might irritate him that most employers are taking the Goldilocks approach and opting for a compromise with employees by settling on hybrid. Andrew Hill and I had a look at how this policy is evolving in workplaces across the world.
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Look out when the B-team is left in charge: I did think twice about including Pilita Clark’s column. I am deputising for this newsletter, after all. I am hoping I can’t muck things up too much. (Feel free not to point out if I am!)
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Experiments are key for more grown-up industrial relations: Sarah O’Connor has a look at the plans by Labour, the UK’s opposition party, to launch sectoral collective bargaining: “a system that is common in continental Europe but would represent a big change in the way the UK economy work”.
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US accountants: higher pay is the solution, not lower standards: The FT’s Lex column takes a look at the shortage of accountants in the US. So acute is the scarcity that pressure is growing to loosen the educational requirements for becoming a certified public accountant. But that alone will not be enough to lure more recruits.
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The Other Black Girl TV review: I very much enjoyed the novel by Zakiya Dalila Harris on race and the publishing industry (read it if you enjoyed Yellowface). I am looking forward to the television series based on the “workplace satire-cum-mystery thriller” — of course, there will also be The Morning Show, competing for my work drama attention.
One more thing . . .
I can’t stop thinking about Celine Song’s film Past Lives, about two South Korean sweethearts who find each other years later — and half a world away. The performances between Teo Yoo (who plays Hae Sung) and Greta Lee (Na Young) are magnetic. It made me reflect on past love but also how connected work is to the person you become.
A word from the Working It community
Last week’s newsletter on trust at work (and why do we trust our employers so much?) prompted some thought-provoking reader replies, writes Isabel Berwick. Here’s Vera Cherepanova, an ethics adviser:
‘Trust: both a moral quality and a financial arrangement, as though virtue and money were synonymous’, says Hernan Diaz, the author of Trust.
To elaborate, my thoughts are that the decision to trust has both cognitive and affective components. Cognitive factors alone are insufficient. Therefore, trust is a fusion of rational judgment and emotional connection. And this is what makes it so interesting.
— The cognitive factors are competence, effectiveness, reliability.
— The affective factors: honesty, transparency, benevolence and ability to serve my best interest.
Read the full article here