CHAPTER 2

MANAGING A ­MULTIGENERATIONAL WORKFORCE

How many stages are there to our lives? Shakespeare counted seven. First, the infant (‘mewling and puking’), then the schoolchild (‘creeping like snail unwillingly to school’). The third stage was the lover, followed by the soldier. Fifth was the judge (‘fair round belly’), then old age (‘the lean and slipper’d pantaloon’) and, finally, a second childhood (‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’).

By the second half of the twentieth century, we seemed to have whittled Shakespeare’s ages down to three. The first was growing up and getting educated. The second was working, having children and saving. The third was retirement, living off those savings and a pension, preferably still with teeth, and with glasses to compensate for those failing eyes.

Not everyone enjoyed the third of these stages. You had to be in good health, have been lucky enough to have made those savings, and have a decent pension. But, in any case, the three stages have now gone, as Andrew Scott, a London Business School professor, told an FT Forums event.

One reason the three-stage life has collapsed, Andrew said, is that we are living longer. In 1999, about 1 in 6 people in the UK was older than 65, according to the Office for National Statistics. By 2019, this was one in five. By 2039, it is expected to be about one in four.1

The number of centenarians has shot up. In the UK, people who reach their 100th birthday receive a message from the Queen. In the early years of the millennium, one royal assistant sent out the cards. By 2016, seven were needed to do the job.2

Organisations have, in recent decades, become used to pushing people out and into retirement in their sixties or even mid to late-fifties. There was a time when some people didn’t mind this. They often welcomed giving up work. Many had secure pensions. But today, those secure pensions have largely gone. The gold standard for pensions is the defined benefit pension, which pays out a proportion of your final salary. But the number of private-sector-defined benefit pension schemes still open to new entrants fell 71.5 per cent in the 10 years from 2008 to 2018, according to the Pensions Policy Institute, a research organisation, in a report titled, fittingly, ‘Approaching the endgame’.3

The result is that many of those nearing what used to be thought of as retirement age are now in no position to stop working. Without a substantial pension, they can’t afford to. And, with people living longer, even many of those with significant savings and pensions now want to carry on working. If they are in their late fifties or sixties, they know they could still live for another 30 or 40 years.

Work gives meaning to people’s lives and a shape to their days and weeks. Why would they give it up when they could still have a third of their lives ahead of them? Employers, increasingly, will have to look at how to keep these older workers on and make use of their experience. The alternative could be a rise in age discrimination suits. Employers often forget about age when discussing diversity. That could prove a costly mistake.

While the over 65s are making up an increasingly large proportion of the population, the number of young people is shrinking. In 1999, an estimated 20.4 per cent of the UK population was under 16. By 2019, this had gone down to 19 per cent. By 2039, the figure is expected to be 16.9 per cent.4

The same trend – an ageing population and a drop in the number of young people – is happening in many countries. There is a simple reason for the fall in the number of youngsters. Women are having fewer children. Worldwide, in 1960, women, on average, had five children each, according to World Bank figures. By 2020, that had more than halved to 2.4. In many countries, the number is lower than that. In 2020, the average American woman had 1.8 children. Chinese and British women had 1.7 children. In Japan, the figure was 1.4; in Korea, it was 1.5

For organisational and company leaders, this demographic shift has two consequences: organisations are going to have to hold on to more of their older workers – and they will have to compete more fiercely for the younger ones. But they will also have to manage a new kind of workforce, one we have not seen before, in which young recruits work alongside people who are old enough not just to be their parents, but sometimes their grandparents. Welcome to the multigenerational workplace.

BOOMER, X, MILLENNIAL, Z: ARE THE GENERATIONS REALLY THAT DIFFERENT?

The FT Weekend has a feature called ‘Fantasy Dinner Parties’ in which journalists dream up a guest list of famous names they would like to invite to dinner. Imagine planning such a party and inviting Bill Gates, Emma Thompson, George Galloway, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. A strange gathering, right? The conversation would be explosive.

Yet, as ill-assorted as our guests might be, they would have one thing in common. They are all Baby Boomers, members of the generation born between 1946 and 1964. The Baby Boomers acquired their label because they were born during a population spurt that followed the Second World War. In the USA, the number of babies born each year increased from a pre-war level of under 3 million to 3.4 million in 1946. In subsequent years, the number of births rose to above 4 million a year and remained at that level until 1964, when the birth rate fell again.6

The generation that came after the Baby Boomers were dubbed Generation X after a novel written by the Canadian author Douglas Coupland. The generation after theirs was called Generation Y, but became better known as the Millennials, a group the Pew Research Center defined as being born between 1981 and 1996.7 Those born from 1997 onwards have come to be known as Generation Z.

What is the point of naming generations? Well, to many, it’s fun. We can make jokey observations about the differences between them. For example, at the FT Forums meeting, Eliza Filby, an expert on generations, talked about the way Baby Boomers dealt with photographs compared with Generation Zers. ‘A Baby Boomer may upload 15 photos of their ­gorgeous grandkids – just upload, upload – perhaps whilst their grandkids are ­playing, right? No filter, no sense of edit or airbrushing. They just upload. A Gen Zer will take 100 photographs and upload one perfectly airbrushed, perfectly set, lighting in the right place.’ She got a laugh of recognition from her audience.

But many argue that there are differences between the generations that go beyond this lightheartedness – and have implications for the workforce and for leadership. The Pew Research Center, which is based in ­Washington DC, argues that labelling the generations is helpful because it allows us to think about the political and social changes that formed each age cohort and shaped the way it, in turn, sees the world.

Let’s start with the Baby Boomers, many of whom are still working. What formed their generation? They were born into the post-Second World War world. They came of age with The Beatles, the Woodstock festival and the contraceptive pill, which gave women greater control over their reproductive lives and transformed sexual relations. The Baby Boomers lived through the Cold War, the nuclear stand-off between the Western and Soviet blocs, and the proxy wars that they engendered, the most prominent being in Vietnam.

After the Baby Boomers came Generation X, which did not have as clear an identity and is sometimes called ‘the forgotten generation’. A 2019 New York Times article described Generation X, those born between 1965 and 1980, as ‘this gloomy, goofy club of forgotten middle children’.

What are Generation X best known for? The New York Times mentioned the Sony Walkman, the mobile cassette player with headphones that allowed you to listen to music all by yourself. ‘Long before Spotify offered 35 million songs to any smartphone, the ability to wander the streets while grooving on 10 whole new songs from a cassette tape seemed like the discovery of fire,’ The New York Times said. That’s a little cruel. In truth, there are famous and influential Generation Xers, including J. K. Rowling, Elon Musk and Emmanuel Macron.

There were fewer Generation Xers than there were either Boomers or Millennials, who came next. In the USA, in 2019, when The New York Times published its article, there were 65 million Generation Xers, 75 million Baby Boomers and 83 million Millennials.8 (Yes, the Millennials outnumbered the post-war Boomers in the USA in 2018, helped by an influx of younger immigrants.9 Worldwide, Millennials overtook Baby Boomers even earlier, in 1992, largely because of the high number of Millennials in the developing world.)10

Millennials, for their part, came of age during a technological revolution, the development of the internet and mobile communications – and Andrew Scott cites technology as the second great development, along with longevity, that is changing the way we work.

The Pew Research Center points out that most Millennials were between 5 and 20 years old when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred. Millennials were marked by those events and have kept their memories of them. The Millennial generation also grew up in the shadow of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pew Research Center pointed out. They witnessed the election of America’s first black president.

From a work point of view, many Millennials entered employment during the downturn that followed the 2008 financial crisis. Their earnings, then and later, were damaged by the subsequent economic downturn. As the Pew Research Center says: ‘The long-term effect of this “slow start” for ­Millennials will be a factor in American society for decades.’ These aren’t just US issues. The difficulties Millennials face in achieving the economic security of many of their Boomer parents is a phenomenon in a lot of countries. Owning a decent-sized home, for example, remains a distant prospect for Millennials in cities worldwide.

For Generation Z, who are succeeding Millennials as new entrants to the workplace, the mobile, always-on world is not one that has developed as they have grown up. It has always been part of their lives.

Before we discuss each of these generations in a little more detail, let’s return to our fantasy dinner party and its ill-assorted guests. They are all Baby Boomers, yet look how differently they turned out and how little they have in common – politically, culturally and personally.

The same is true of all generations. Andrew Scott told the FT Forums event that, while it is interesting to discuss the differences between generations, ‘we do this at our peril’. The differences within generations are often bigger than those between them. Every person, whatever generation they are part of, has lived their own lives, been through their own ups and downs, suffered different tragedies and experienced different joys. In the words of a beloved Baby Boomer film, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, we are all individuals. Leaders need to remember that.

All the same, different generations are at different stages of their working lives, and this does make a difference. Generation Z are entering the workplace, Generation X and the Millennials have been there a while, and the Boomers are work veterans – senior staffers, on the way out, retired, or doing new things. Each of these work stages places particular demands on those people, and on their leaders. So, let’s examine what they expect from work, and from their leaders, starting with the newest workers, the Generation Zers.

THE NEW ENTRANTS

One thing you need to know about Generation Z, says Eliza Filby, our generations expert, is that they shop around. They are used to comparing products, services and dating prospects online, and they do the same when they go job-hunting. ‘They are basically doing what they do on Tinder,’ Eliza said. ‘They are looking for choices and options all the time.’

And, even after you offer them a job, they will carry on looking for another one. On an education programme I was moderating for an international logistics company, I heard exactly the same from someone on the other side of the world. This was a senior manager working for the company in South Korea. The new generation of recruits, she confirmed, never stops job-shopping, even after they have found a job – even in South Korea, where a job for life in a large company was once the ideal.

Eliza had more to say about Generation Z. They have never known a life without mobile phones (which is why they’re so handy with photos). Generation Z are cyborgs: ‘part machine, part human being’, she told FT Forums. Having been born to technology, they are also savvy about it and sceptical of it. They jealously protect their data privacy. They are, Eliza said, entrepreneurial, buying and selling clothes on sites such as eBay and Depop.

There is another aspect of Generation Z which, Eliza said, is ‘really going to rock the workplace’, and that is their fluidity. Their notions of gender are more fluid than any generation before them. At the same time, they are more cautious and conservative. ‘They’re an incredibly serious generation,’ Eliza said. ‘They’re having less sex, taking fewer drugs, hardly smoking.’

Eliza’s views on Generation Z are borne out by a 2019 study for the UK Food Standards Agency carried out by Britain Thinks, a research consultancy. The study said: ‘Gen Z are drinking less alcohol than previous generations. It is not clear what is driving this, but suggestions include that Gen Z sees drinking as riskier and that they are concerned about their online image. This trend supports wider evidence that Gen Z engage in less “risky” behaviours than past generations of young people, with downward trends in smoking, drinking and teenage pregnancy.’ For this reason, Generation Z have acquired the label ‘Generation Sensible’.11

The report confirmed Eliza’s view that ‘Generation Sensible’ was also ‘Generation Fluid’ and said they were less likely than older generations to identify as heterosexual or to have a binary attitude to gender. Generation Z tended to ‘prioritise gender equality, diversity and LGBT equality more than previous generations’, the report added.

Both Eliza and Britain Thinks pointed to YouTube as an important channel for Generation Z, and that they were as interested in creating content as in viewing it. The report, though, rejected one common view of Generation Z – that they can’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes. ‘A commonly cited claim about Gen Z is that their increased internet use has led to them having shorter attention spans, but there is no evidence to support this,’ the report said.

All the same, this is a mobile-phone-adept generation, so how should employers sell their jobs to them? ‘Firstly, visual,’ Eliza says. ‘This is a generation that is entirely guided by the video medium. They are not on Facebook. They are on Snapchat. They video everything. They want video content, not text on a website.’

What should that video content be? ‘This is a generation that prizes peer-to-peer recommendation above a hierarchical sell. They want recommendations from people their age. So, don’t have interviews with the chief executive – have interviews with actual graduate trainees.’

We need to add two caveats. The first is one we’ve already seen when discussing our Boomer dinner party. These are general trends. Not all ­Generation Zers are the same. There are differences between them, as there are with every generation. It would be a mistake to assume everyone in Generation Z conforms to Eliza or Britain Thinks’ descriptions.

The second caveat is that many Generation Zers will look at this discussion of job-shopping workers who land one position and immediately start looking for another and wonder what world we are talking about. Some Generation Zers can take advantage of the lack of young workers, and employers’ desperate search to find new recruits, and land decent jobs. But many cannot. Increasingly, young entrants to work face a bifurcated job market: good prospect for some and insecure work for others. It’s something the Millennials could tell Generation Z about.

THE WORKFORCE’S RISERS

In April 2021, when England’s coronavirus lockdown was being eased slightly, the Financial Times asked younger employees to provide their views of their lives. Many said some things were better for them than they had been for previous generations. They had better educational opportunities, travel was cheaper, there was greater openness about sexuality and mental health, and technology had connected them to the world.12

But housing and education were more expensive and they had little hope of adequate pensions. And work? It was insecure. The FT quoted a 32-year-old called Stuart who started a job in 2020 with a UK telecoms company. But it wasn’t what his parents or grandparents would have considered a proper job, because it wasn’t actually with the telecoms company. It was with an agency, which provided workers to the telecoms company. Stuart had been told this could lead to a permanent job with the organisation after a year, but, when that time came, he and his agency colleagues instead received an email inviting them to a conference call. Forty of them were laid off.

Stuart didn’t have a home of his own. He was living with his parents, like so many Millennials and the oldest section of Generation Z. A report, published in 2020 by Loughborough University, found that as many as two in three single people in their twenties were living with their parents. These figures were based on research that took place before the coronavirus pandemic and the Loughborough report said the lockdown meant the number of young adults living in the parental home had probably grown, given the disproportionate impact the pandemic had had on younger people’s jobs and incomes. This happened elsewhere. The Pew Research Center reported, in September 2020, that the coronavirus pandemic had pushed the share of 18 to 29-year-old Americans living with their parents to 52 per cent, the first time a majority of young adults had lived in their parents’ homes since the Great Depression.13

Among the reasons for the large numbers living with their parents, according to the Loughborough research, were expensive housing, changing social norms that made staying at home more acceptable, and the insecurity of so many jobs.14 Welcome to the gig economy.

According to an FT editorial, even before the coronavirus struck, many young workers were working in precarious jobs like Stuart’s. One in 10 UK employees aged 16 to 24 were on zero-hours contracts, which meant they had no automatic right to work and could do so only when their employers called for them. In the eurozone, almost half of under-25s were on temporary contracts.15

For many companies, the attractions of employing gig workers are obvious: they can pay them only when they need them. Entire industries, including ride-sharing and home food delivery, have been built on gig workers. For some workers, this suits them. Just as their employers have no long-term commitment to them, so they can work when they want to, take time off or travel (coronavirus restrictions permitting) when they don’t.

In an FT Forums talk in 2018, Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, the ride-hailing company, unsurprisingly defended this view. Whenever he spoke to Uber driver forums, they told him they valued the flexibility. ‘They’re their own bosses. They clearly see themselves as their own bosses; they’re microentrepreneurs,’ he said.

But, for many others, this precarious way of working leaves them in a constant state of insecurity and uncertainty. They cannot plan for the future or think about having children. How would they provide for them? Some gig workers have appealed to the courts, demanding that employers treat them decently and give them the kinds of benefits secure employees had – and which their parents took for granted. In an increasing number of cases, zero hour and insecure workers are winning the fight for better security.

‘It looks like the end of the legal road for the gig economy,’ Sarah O’Connor, an FT columnist, said in February 2021.16 She was writing shortly after the UK Supreme Court ruled that drivers who worked for Uber were not truly self-employed, as the company claimed. They had to conform with many company policies, were employees of Uber in all but name and, therefore, had the right to a minimum wage, paid leave and sick pay. Gig economy companies have lost similar court cases in California, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

But Uber and other gig economy companies are fighting back. In November 2020, they put $200 million into winning voter support for ­Proposition 22, a California state ballot, to allow them to continue to treat their workers as independent contractors, in spite of the courts ­ordering them not to. Voters approved the proposition, with 58 per cent supporting the gig economy companies.17

Why would voters support insecure working conditions? Because the gig economy has enabled companies such as Uber to offer rides that are cheaper than conventional taxi drivers – and those who have been quickest to use companies like Uber are Millennial and Generation Z consumers. A report by Gallup in 2018 found that almost one in three Americans used ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, but the under-thirties were the keenest users of all. Forty-five per cent of Americans aged 18 to 29 used ride-hailing services, compared with 36 per cent of those aged 30 to 49, 23 per cent of 50 to 64-year-olds and just 13 per cent of those older than 65.18

The irony is that the younger generations most worried about the precariousness of their working lives are also the most enthusiastic users of the services provided by precariously employed workers.

What does this mean for company or organisational leaders? How much security they decide to give to their staff depends on the industry they are in and what the law allows them to do. Ride-sharing and takeaway food delivery may be hard businesses to stay in if the law insists that workers have the right to the same perks as fully employed staff.

But organisations can hardly complain if their people are always looking for their next move even while doing their current job. They have grown up with insecure employment. They know that employers long ago tore up the loyalty contract. They are hardly likely to offer undying fealty in return.

For many leaders. this is a problem because most still have large numbers of employed, rather than zero hours, workers on their books. Yes, half of eurozone under-25s were on temporary contracts, but that means that many had secure employment. One in ten British 16 to 24-year-olds were on zero-hour contracts, but most had better conditions than that. They may not be as loyal to their organisations as their parents and grandparents were, but companies still need to get the best out of them.

So, how can leaders keep this footloose younger generation of workers committed and engaged? They need to think about a new working compact with their people.

THE UPPER MIDDLE

Andrew Scott told FT Forums that it’s not just work that has changed. The twin changes of greater longevity and new technology meant, he said, that we were having to ‘reconstitute the map of life’. And that means rethinking the relationship between the organisation and its people.

If employees stay with their organisations and hope to move upwards, many are going to be disappointed. There are, inevitably, few leadership positions at the top of the organisation. People tend to start clustering around the middle, which is why organisations looking to cut costs sometimes dismiss large numbers of their middle managers.

I once chaired an FT Forums event in which a senior leader of a large UK company discussed a recent announcement that the group would be cutting thousands of management and administrative jobs. The aim was to cut costs and invest in technologies that the company thought were crucial to its future.

I asked the leader what that meant for the morale of those who weren’t leaving. She said reductions would happen over several years, which would soften the impact, but she thought, in any case, that far from being demoralising to everyone else, getting rid of what she called ‘a bit of midlife spread around the middle of the organisation’ would send a positive message to younger workers in the company. The disappearance of older workers meant they would have a clearer view of how they could progress up the organisation as it moved into new technologies.

Those leaving probably did not see it that way, although the issue of competition between Millennial and Baby Boomer and Generation X workers for top jobs is a real one that we will come to shortly. But the regular culling of middle managers has its critics. FT columnist Andrew Hill has called middle managers ‘the connecting tissue of large organisations’ and said that companies axed them at their peril. Getting rid of too many managers can leave the remaining leaders with more people reporting to them than they can pay proper attention to.19

All the same, making employees redundant is, these days, an unfortunate fact of working life. As we have already noticed, the job for life is no more. But, when people have to leave, there are ways to do it that limit the damage both to them and to the company. Helping departing staff with their CVs, assisting them into new jobs or activities, and generally treating them humanely can help the organisation in the future. This is true not just of middle managers but of departing employees of any age, whether they are leaving because you have made them redundant or because they are going of their own accord.

Because work is now so much more fluid and less secure, you may well encounter those departing employees again some time. People can have many phases to their careers. Andrew Scott said that, as a management professor, ‘I taught a number of large firms who are realising that they are now interacting with workers in lots of different ways, sometimes as full-time employees, sometimes through the gig economy, and they begin to recognise, actually, they may see people several times during the course of their working career.’

This has implications for both the organisation and the worker. From the organisation’s point of view, it means it is worth treating even the most junior employee, or gig worker, well. However low down they may be in the organisational hierarchy now, who knows, once they move on, when and where they are going to turn up again – as a returning, more senior member of staff, as a supplier, a customer or, perhaps, a regulator or cabinet minister?

The Economist noted, in 2014, that some companies were starting to moderate their approach to departing staff: ‘Workers who quit are sometimes escorted out by security guards, their smart phones confiscated and their e-mail accounts deactivated. But in the professional services, former employees are increasingly treated as assets, not turncoats.’20 You may, for data protection purposes, indeed need to deactivate people’s emails when they leave and ask them to return their company phones and laptops, but there is no need to be nasty to them. Happy alumni may not only turn into business partners; they can also be helpful recruiters in future, sending promising potential employees your way and assuring them that your company is a decent place to work.

McKinsey, the global strategy consulting firm, has run into reputational trouble in recent years, paying $574 million to settle lawsuits brought by 49 US states over its role in the opioid addiction crisis and criticised for its ties to corrupt associates of then-President Jacob Zuma in South Africa. But McKinsey is a pioneer and master of keeping in touch with its former employees. When they leave, or when they are asked to go because they are not rising fast enough in the firm, they remain part of a loyal alumni network. Many ex-McKinsey people reach top positions elsewhere, not necessarily in other consulting firms but in companies that could become clients. You find the firm’s former staffers everywhere. McKinsey alumni include Sheryl Sandberg, for 14 years chief operating officer of Facebook (which in 2021 changed its name to Meta), Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, its parent company, and Tony Danker, head of the CBI, the UK employers’ body.21

You don’t have to be a leading strategy consultancy to establish an alumni network. With social media and email lists, the cost of running an alumni network has plunged. It’s easy, when people go, to offer them ways of keeping in touch; letting them know what is happening and what jobs are on offer in their old workplace.

THE INTERGENERATIONAL BATTLE IN THE TOP RANKS

Paul Ewart, a University of Oxford physics professor, had reached the university’s retirement age of 67 (it has since gone up to 68), but he still felt he had plenty of useful work to do. He asked to stay on and received a two-year extension. When that ended, he asked for another one but was told it was now time for him to retire. He sued the university for age discrimination and won.22

What should interest leaders were Oxford’s arguments in their defence of telling Professor Ewart his career was over, because those arguments will increasingly crop up in many organisations. Under European Union and UK law, age discrimination, unlike other forms of discrimination such as race or gender, is allowed, provided the organisation can show that it can be ‘objectively and reasonably justified by a legitimate aim’.

In other words, age discrimination, which includes having a mandatory retirement age, can be justified if there is a good organisational reason – and Oxford said it had several. Asking someone Professor Ewart’s age to go was necessary, first, for reasons of ‘intergenerational fairness’, Oxford said: if older employees hogged all the top jobs, there wouldn’t be opportunities for younger staff members. Second, older employees, because they tended to be white and male, made it hard for the university to implement its diversity policies.

The UK employment tribunal dismissed these arguments. It said the organisational benefits Oxford was claiming by refusing to extend Professor Ewart’s contract were trivial compared with the discrimination against him.

This case doesn’t settle the matter; Oxford had earlier won a similar age discrimination case against another academic. But it’s an argument we can expect to see more of: how can organisations free up spaces for the generation behind? If older employees insist on staying on, do we risk a battle of Baby Boomers against Generation Xers, or both generations against Millennials? It doesn’t need to come to that. There are alternatives.

In 2014, Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecoms boss, said that older workers should be offered the chance to work three days a week. If people were going to work until they were 70 or 75-years old, they needed more flexibility.23 The flexible working debate has moved on since then, given greater impulse by the great work-from-home of the coronavirus pandemic. Some companies have been experimenting with the idea of a four-day working week.24

But there are many more ways to offer older staff alternatives to retirement that still unblock promotion opportunities for younger employees. Organisations can consider offering older managers consulting roles that allow them to step down from management responsibilities while giving the organisation the benefit of their experience. They could second them to customers or suppliers. And, as Carlos Slim said, they could reduce their working hours.

All of these require open discussion, and the recognition that managing a multigenerational workforce, with an age range of 50 years or more, takes some imagination and flexible thinking.

FURTHER READING

When it comes to multigenerational working life, Andrew Scott’s two books, co-written with fellow London Business School Professor Lynda Gratton, are worth reading: The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of ­Longevity and The New Long Life: A Framework for Flourishing in a ­Changing World.

An interesting FT column looking at Generation Z’s attitudes to social media and email (they don’t do it) by Elaine Moore is called ‘How social media is opening a new generation gap’ and is available at: www.ft.com/content/1ea5b754-f652-4f7e-99af-ec412737a584.

The FT series ‘A New Deal for the Young’ covers a wide range of ­topics, including the voices of many young readers and is available at: www.ft.com/content/70930b3d-e9d1-4f8a-8792-5e0ec8e978eb.