FOREWORD

From its start in 1888, the Financial Times has never run short of news. FT journalists have always found it easy to fill the pink newspaper, covering world wars, the economic rise of Asia, the birth of the internet, the global financial crisis and the climate emergency.

But in recent years, it seems, history has accelerated. Globalisation has bound markets and industries more closely together than ever before. Technology has enabled smart inventions to move from research lab to market quicker than ever before. And convulsive social, cultural and political changes – ranging from increasing diversity in the workplace, to the explosion of social media, to the rise of the gig economy – have transformed our working lives more profoundly than ever before.

Business leaders have had to grapple with this ever-lengthening checklist of challenges, often with imperfect information and little time and in an almost totally transparent environment in which their every move is subject to scrutiny and double-guessing. To help executives navigate this world of uncertainty, the FT launched the 125 Forum in 2013 to enable the next ­generation of business heads to learn from some of the world’s most insightful leaders and to share their own ideas and experiences with each other. As deputy editor of the FT at that time, I constantly heard chief executives saying how much they wanted their line managers to broaden their outlook, learn from other companies, industries and regions and ­challenge their own organisation’s ways of doing things. ‘It’s lonely at the top, although you are never alone’, one chief executive told us.

The name of the forum celebrated the 125th anniversary of the year the FT was founded, with the aim of serving as the friend of ‘the honest financier and the respectable broker’ — a mission we still embrace today. Mark Carney, the newly arrived governor of the Bank of England, was good enough to speak at the forum’s launch event.

Since then, the 125 Forum (later renamed FT Forums) has held more than 100 events and has proved extremely popular with our readers and corporate partners. Our forum’s members have encouraged us to focus on three main areas: geopolitics, technological disruption and the challenges of leadership. And we have hosted many inspirational speakers, including Bill Gates, Dara Khosrowshahi, Paul Polman, Kofi Annan and even Sophia the robot. The FT has also launched a Women’s Forum and set up specialist forums for corporate finance (Due Diligence) and environmental, social and governance issues (Moral Money).

Our speakers have unfailingly prompted lively discussion among members, usually over a glass (or two) of wine. Often, the forum seems to have served as a kind of intellectual wok into which participants have thrown their own experiences and collectively stir-fried some zingy ideas. In this book, Michael Skapinker, an FT contributing editor and former management editor, has done a masterful job of summarising many of the forum’s most interesting discussions and drawing out invaluable lessons that managers can apply in their everyday jobs.

Of the many events we have run, two most clearly stick in my memory. At one, Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations who sadly passed away in 2018, gave a mesmerising talk about Africa and the lessons he had learned from running a complex international bureaucracy during times of crisis.

In particular, he explained how every organisation needed both ‘engineers’ and ‘farmers’: engineers to design systems and occasionally ­hammer things into place and farmers to nurture people and encourage them to grow. Trying to reach any consensus among the UN’s 193 fractious members must count as one of the world’s toughest managerial challenges. But Annan explained how his secret was to listen carefully to everyone, slowly build consensus and only act when he knew he could command support. ‘I believe that a good leader also has to be a good follower,’ he said.

On another occasion, Bill Gates was startlingly candid about how naive he had been about hiring people when he first set up Microsoft, leading to dire results. At that time, he believed that IQ was ‘fungible’, as he put it. A sufficiently smart person should be able to do any job, he thought, so he built an ‘IQ hierarchy’ at Microsoft. But soon he realised that the intelligence needed to excel at sales or management might be ‘negatively correlated’ with writing good code or understanding physics equations. In running his philanthropic foundation, Gates now looks to blend different ‘pools of IQ’ by forming teams of people with complementary skills.

The one constant insight that runs like a thread through all the subsequent chapters in this book is that human dimension. No matter how much we may focus on technological capability, or market dynamics or economic trends, business is ultimately about people: how to hire and inspire them. We need both engineers and farmers.

The guiding principle of FT Forums has always been that we have an enormous amount to learn from each other. In that spirit, we hope you will enjoy this book.

John Thornhill
Financial Times Innovation Editor and founder of FT Forums