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FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
How much fun do you generally have at work?
I found myself asking this question the other day, when I ran into a British academic named William Donald. He is an associate professor at the University of Southampton, where he works in professional development and human resource management, and in 2022 he came up with an idea. What if he could publish a paper with another academic whose last name was Duck, so that anyone citing his research would have to say it was Donald and Duck’s?
I’d like to say there was a serious reason for this undertaking, but when I called Donald, he said he did it mainly because “I thought it would be mildly entertaining.”
Unfortunately, finding a Duck coop proved arduous. Donald spent 18 months reaching out to potential co-authors via LinkedIn before finding Nicholas Duck, an organizational psychologist in Australia who runs a workplace productivity consultancy called Opposite.
Unlike other candidates, Duck did not find Donald’s proposal offensive or ridiculous. “I like to change things up and not take them too seriously,” he told me last week. Donald’s idea was perfect for him, he said.
Since they both shared an interest in the workplace, they decided to write an article about what they called the Donald Duck phenomenon, or the unconventional reasons that drive academics to publish. These included revenge against a rival; collaboration with a hero; a desire to promote a cause and simple fun.
The result was a thin work of only three pages (five of them include references and notes) that, surprisingly, was published last month in the GiLE Diary of Skills Development. It is a relatively new, open access journal that nevertheless claims to use a “robust” peer review process.
For all that, the article does not add an enormous amount to the sum of human knowledge. You could say it’s self-indulgent and childish. But it’s also a delight and I wish there were more crazy things like that.
It’s not just that these things make much of life spent at work more bearable. There are serious reasons for fun at work when governments across Europe are worried about a post-pandemic drop in average working hours, which is attributed to the weakness and lack of competitiveness of the economies.
Obviously, jokes alone are not an answer. But it’s revealing to consider how little we hear about joy at work these days.
It’s been 17 years since Steve Jobs took to a stage in San Francisco to unveil a new Apple device called the iPhone and called a nearby Starbucks. order “4,000 lattes missing, please.” She immediately said “wrong number” and hung up. But the store was still receiving orders for that many coffees from Apple fans years later, to the point that bewilderment of managers.
However, chief executive antics are few and far between. I was amazed recently read that Jane Fraser, CEO of Citigroup, is a serial prankster with a long history of playing pranks on her colleagues.
In 2022, he asked his senior team to sign a waiver to skydive, the Wall Street Journal reported, and let them agonize over the prospect of all the bank’s leaders risking death together before emailing them again to say: April Fool’s Day.
On another occasion, he allegedly kidnapped a teddy bear he had once given to an executive in charge of cost-cutting, taped its paws, and told the man to cut back on cutting or the bear would keep it.
News of this joy could shake some parts of Citi, where Fraser is overseeing widespread job losses. Even jokes about academic citations can fall flat.
In the 1940s, a physicist named George Gamow decided it would be fun to add the name of an eminent friend, Hans Bethe, to a paper that Gamow and his student, Ralph Alpher, had written on the origins of the universe.
This had the excellent effect of creating an Alpher, Bethe and Gamow article, a play on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha beta gamma. But Alpher was reportedly annoyingfearing that his contribution would be diminished by the addition of the name of the eminent Bethe.
You can see his point. Jokes at work must be done with skill and care. However, the best are glorious and the working world would be a much better place if we had many more of them.