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FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
On US Election Day this week, I was overcome with a familiar feeling of anxiety, dismay and fear.
This had almost nothing to do with the election and everything to do with my decision to spend time that day at the Financial Times’ main editorial desk.
For the sake of research, I wanted to see what news editing work was like since I last worked at that desk in London many years ago.
It is evident that a lot has changed since then. The homepage is all-consuming; a completely different team of editors handles the printed paper. But many things remain the same, like the stomach-churning anxiety of inserting a mistake in the rush to publish. And the gut-wrenching fear of receiving a late, confusing story that doesn’t need as much editing as open heart surgery. And the relentless speed of the work.
“Are you OK?” muttered the news editor, a man I’ve known for almost 20 years, as I jokingly tried to log into the top editors’ first morning news meeting. Nervously, I finally turned on the sound while he explained why he was there, after which I thanked him and called him Tim instead of his real name, which is Tom.
This was a reminder of something I had forgotten in the years I was away from that job. It is much more difficult than it seems from the outside.
The experience confirmed that business leaders who do what Boeing’s new CEO Kelly Ortberg did the other week deserve a lot of credit.
When Ortberg exposed his plans To restore confidence in the embattled aerospace giant, he highlighted one in particular: putting executives in factories as part of “a fundamental cultural change.”
“We need to know what is happening, not only with our products, but also with our people,” he said. “We need to prevent problems from escalating and work better together to identify, fix and understand the root cause.”
This seems obvious to any company, much less a staggering after two fatal accidents of its best-selling plane, the 737 Max.
However, if it were really obvious, there would be no headlines every time someone like Ortberg issues such an edict. Or Home Depot tells corporate office staff to work a full day at one of its stores each quarter, as it did this year. Or Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi reveals that he has been working as a driver, as he did last year.
Perhaps more bosses than we hear spend time responding to customer complaints on social media, such as Greg Jackson, chief executive of UK energy supplier Octopus Energy. Or deciding that a human can adjust a car window seal faster than a robot by testing it themselves on an assembly line, as Elon Musk did at Tesla.
But I doubt it. For one thing, few CEOs are like Musk. Plus, running a business is hard. It can be easy to get caught up in the daily crossfire of drama. One night, when Khosrowshahi was driving a client to the airport, he had to ignore what the Wall Street Journal said were frantic phone calls from his legal director trying to tell him that the company’s network had been hacked.
It also takes a lot of confidence to expose yourself to ridicule from subordinates who know more about how a job is done, especially for CEOs who are unfamiliar with the industry they are joining.
But I suspect that many executives avoid the workshop because they have succumbed to an aspect of power poisoning, or the way behavior changes when you get to the top.
In this case, they think that because they are in charge, they understand everything they need to know to lead well, even when it is clear that they don’t. Academics call this the centrality fallacy and it can be somewhat discouraging to see. Ask any worker who is repeatedly asked by a clueless boss to do something that is probably unfeasible.
Of course, practical experience alone does not guarantee success. Laxman Narasimhan completed 40 hours of barista training before taking over as Starbucks CEO and last year said he would continue working behind the counter half a day a month. he was overthrown 17 months later. Falling sales and an activist investor will probably always trump even the best Frappuccino technique.