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FT editor Roula Khalaf has chosen her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
This week on Election Day in the United States, I felt a familiar feeling of anxiety, disappointment, and fear.
This had little to do with the election and everything to do with my decision to spend time at the FT’s main news desk that day.
In a research interest, I wanted to find out what a news editing job has been like since I last worked at a desk in London many years ago.
Obviously a lot has changed since then. The homepage is all-consuming. A completely separate team of editors will be responsible for the printed paper. But many things remain the same, including the stomach-churning fear that errors will be inserted in the rush to publish. And the heart-stopping fear of receiving a late, gibberish story that doesn’t need as much editing as open-heart surgery. And the relentless speed of work.
“Are you okay?” a news editor I’ve known for nearly 20 years muttered to me as I playfully tried to log in to the morning’s first news meeting of top editors. I was panicking as he explained why I was there, when I finally heard the sound. So I thanked him and called him Tim instead of his actual name, Tom.
This reminded me of something I had forgotten during my years away from work. It’s much harder than it looks from the outside.
The experience confirmed that business leaders who do what Boeing’s new chief executive, Kelly Ortberg, did last week deserve a lot of credit.
As Mr. Ortberg laid out his plan to restore confidence in the beleaguered aerospace giant, he specifically emphasized putting executives on the factory floor as part of a “fundamental cultural change.”
“We need to know what’s going on, not just with our products, but with our employees,” he said. “We need to work better together to prevent problems from worsening and to identify, remediate, and understand root causes.”
This seems obvious to any company, let alone one reeling from the aftermath of two fatal crashes involving its best-selling 737 Max aircraft.
But if it were really obvious, someone like Ortberg wouldn’t make headlines if he issued such a proclamation. Alternatively, Home Depot is directing its corporate office staff to work a full day at one of its stores every quarter, as it did this year. Or, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi revealed that she is still working as a driver, just as she did last year.
Perhaps more bosses than we hear about spend time responding to customer complaints on social media, such as Greg Jackson, chief executive of UK electricity supplier Octopus Energy. Maybe. Or you could try it yourself on an assembly line, like Elon Musk did with Tesla, and decide that humans can adjust car window seals faster than robots.
But I doubt it. First, there are very few CEOs like Musk. Also, running a company is difficult. It can be easy to get caught up in the barrage of daily drama. One night, as Mr. Khosrowshahi was driving a client to the airport, he received a frantic call from his chief legal officer to inform him that the company’s network had been hacked, the Wall Street Journal reported. But Khosrowshahi had to ignore it.
It also takes a lot of confidence, especially for CEOs who are new to their industry, to expose themselves to the ridicule of subordinates who are more knowledgeable about how their work is done.
However, I think many executives avoid the field because they fall into the side of power addiction, or because their behavior changes once they reach the top.
In this case, they think that because they are in charge, they know everything they need to know to lead successfully, even if they obviously don’t. Scholars call this the centrality fallacy, and it may be surprising to see. Ask any employee who has been repeatedly asked to do things that are clearly unfeasible by an ignorant boss.
Of course, practical experience alone does not guarantee success. Laxman Narasimhan underwent 40 hours of barista training before becoming CEO of Starbucks, and last year said he would continue to work half a day behind the counter every month. He was expelled after 17 months. Declining sales and activist investors will probably always trump even the best Frappuccino technology.
pilita.clark@ft.com
