When in doubt, turn to La Rochefoucauld:

“Nous sommes si accoutumés à nous déguiser aux autres qu’enfin nous nous déguisons à nous-mêmes.” (Maximes 119)

(We get so used to disguising ourselves to others that we end up becoming disguised to ourselves.)

There’s nothing like a good dose of French scepticism to shake you up in the morning. The noble duke’s words came to mind recently when a new DVD landed on my desk. Offering an “expert’s guide” to interview skills, it was accompanied by a press release that was headlined: “Don’t just look the part, act the part.”

The training film is divided into sections such as “Ensure you are instantly liked”, “Breeze past tricky questions”, and “Close the interview with style”. All your problems solved for just £14.99. How deep can the crisis in capitalism really be if the market is still coming up with products like this?

But the DVD’s producers have, perhaps without realising it, hit upon a recurring management challenge. How should you present yourself to the world? What sort of leadership style does the situation demand? Or should you simply ignore such thoughts as you get on with the business of “being yourself”?

Continue reading Know who you are meant to be

The BBC World Service has been playing a fun game on its books programme, The Word. It has been asking listeners to sum up their lives in six words - an idea borrowed from Smith, a US magazine.

There have been some wonderful mini-memoirs sent to the BBC, my favourite being “squandered more chances than others get”, submitted by a mournful man in the Netherlands.

It made me wonder whether the same approach might work in summarising the leadership style of top managers. 

(more…)

You are 40 years old, head of China investment banking for Merrill Lynch, the pride of your family and clearly destined for greatness. So, Wilson Feng, what do you say to the Bloomberg reporter who phones you up and asks for an interview?

“I want to change my life,” Mr Feng said. “It’s a nightmare. My father won’t recognise me if I stay in investment banking.”

Mr Feng is off to go and work for a state-owned Chinese company. “Salaries at state-owned enterprises are low compared with investment banking, but you can have a better life,” he explained. Merrill Lynch is gutted. “It’s sad to see him go. He was a model employee,” said Damian Chunilal, head of Pacific Rim investment banking.

Continue reading “The meaning of life at work”

The UK’s Combined Code on Corporate Governance requires public companies to comply with its recommendations, or explain why they have chosen to ignore them. As of today Marks and Spencer has a lot of explaining to do.

From 1 June, the company said today, Sir Stuart Rose will become executive chairman, effectively combining the roles of chair and CEO. This flies in the face of Combined Code orthodoxy. True, other colleagues are stepping up to take on some of Sir Stuart’s duties. Ian Dyson, currently finance director, will take on the additional responsibility of HR and operations. Kate Bostock, head of women’s wear, and Steve Esom, head of food, join the board.

Sir Stuart now says he will not leave the company before 2011, thus allowing his fellow executive directors time to build their case to win the top job in due course.

Shareholders and analysts will be concerned that this move formally concentrates too much power in Sir Stuart’s hands. One, L&G, went on the record with its objections only a few hours after M&S’s announcement.

Personally, I will take some of the governance gurus’ objections with an unhealthily large pinch of salt. Sir Stuart is clearly his own man, and has been well and truly in charge at M&S for several years. Lord Burns, the outgoing chairman, says that execs and non-execs alike at M&S are happy with the new arrangements. Where is the problem?

If Sir Stuart were a crook, or an incompetent, we might have grounds for concern. But this is someone who turned down the prospect of absolutely gigantic rewards, running M&S for Sir Philip Green’s private equity-style bid in 2004, and instead took the riskier and relatively much less well paid option of keeping M&S public. He has done an excellent job so far. If this is his chosen method of exit, and this seems to him to be the best way of blooding a successor, I think we should trust him and back his judgment.

Of course, if things now go badly wrong for him and the company I will be among the first to condemn him.

Michael Hyatt is a brave man. Along with his fellow executives, the boss of Thomas Nelson, a private equity-owned publisher specialising in Christian titles, is compiling a book laying out the group’s long history - which dates back to 1798 - and its way of doing things.

Mr Hyatt decided to post a draft of the first chapter of the book on his blog with the aim of soliciting comments from employees and other interested parties that would help him to hone his prose. His post provoked a mixture of back-slapping and nit-picking. A response posted by ‘Nicole’ paved the way for the nit-pickers:

Fascinating story.

(Two copy editing errors in the final paragraph–first and third sentences.)

A second nit-picker claimed that the writing lacked creativity. A third suggested that the authorial point of view was inconsistent. A fourth fretted about whether he had missed out a couple of commas. A fifth claimed he had contradicted himself at one point. A sixth said the number “81″ should be spelled out and hyphenated. A seventh claimed his style was a little lacklustre.

Some bosses would never tolerate being corrected by their juniors in public. But nitpicking isn’t a bad thing if you view it from the primate’s perspective.

When primates pick nits out of each other’s fur, they are strengthening the social bonds holding them together as a group. Wittingly or unwittingly, Mr Hyatt has offered his staff a similar chance to demonstrate their shared sense of purpose by grooming him publicly.

Ook! An underling spots a split infinitive lurking near the ceo’s armpit, expertly nips it between her fingers and eats it. Ook! An incorrect usage of “that” is changed to “which” by another member of the troop. Ook! There goes a grocer’s apostrophe.

Precise use of language is central to any book publisher and no author is expected to submit an error-free manuscript. Given those two points, I can’t see how the public nit-picking could be harmful to Thomas Nelson and its leader. On the contrary, beware the ungroomed ceo.

Sir Lindsay Owen-Jones, chairman and former chief executive of L’Oréal, says the business of selling cosmetics is all about intuition. But in an FT interview today, he makes it clear that climbing the management ladder at the French company was also an intuitive task.

Before getting his own chance to run the company, Sir Lindsay had to answer to François Dalle, whom he describes as having been an autocratic yet brilliant boss. He says Mr Dalle was not the clearest internal communicator either.

“He spoke in riddles so he was a very difficult man to interpret. I think one of the reasons I got responsibility so young was that I could interpret the things he said, which often were the opposite of what he actually said literally.”

Also in today’s paper: the FT’s resident manufacturing guru, Peter Marsh, profiles a British toymaker that has stopped producing plastic parts in China and now gets them made in the UK. Although it costs more, Bedlam Puzzles says manufacturing locally creates fewer supply headaches.

No matter how cushy it might appear to outsiders, being chosen to run your family’s business has its negative points. Just ask William Lauder, the chief executive of Estée Lauder, the US cosmetics firm. “Leading a public company is a sentence but leading a publicly held, family-controlled business is a life sentence,” Mr Lauder is quoted as saying in a Wall Street Journal article analysing his decision to bring in an outsider as his eventual successor.

Mr Lauder is the grandson of Estée Lauder, who founded the company with her husband in 1946, and is the son of Leonard Lauder, who preceded him as ceo and who remains chairman. Working in the family business meant he had to work ”twice as hard for half the credit”, William complains, adding that it didn’t help that some board members knew him from when he was a child.

Running a family business does indeed create peculiar strains. The Earl of March and Kinrara -the British hereditary peer who is trying to diversify a leisure business located at Goodwood, the family seat - admits that it can be disconcerting having ancestors peering down at him from their portraits. “Every time I walk up to bed, I see them all up on the wall, and think ‘Oh Christ, what do they think’s going on?’”

Tension between the various members of a business dynasty can lead to all-out conflict, as detailed in Family Wars, a new book reviewed in the FT today. But how can family-owned companies avoid being poisoned by the sometimes toxic mixture of blood and bottom line?

Earlier this year, Professor Josèp Tapies and Alfonso Chiner of IESE, the Spanish business school, came up with a list of ten governance tips for family businesses. Among other things, they stressed the need for each generation to be given the freedom to partly reshape the business. Old grievances between relatives needed to be addressed and healed, while family employees were to be referred to by both given name and surname. Meanwhile, the role of spouses of family members also had to be thought through, they added.

Perhaps Mr Lauder could add an 11th commandment: allow no-one to be appointed to the board who has seen you frolicking naked in a paddling pool.