Ryanair volte-face shows feedback is best given face-to-face

By Lucy Kellaway

Earlier this month Ryanair decided that being horrid to customers was not a great business strategy and declared it would be a bit nicer. This was pretty remarkable and has, indeed, been much remarked upon.

Yet even more remarkable was what caused chief executive Michael O’Leary to make this U-turn. It was not market research. It was not social networks. It certainly was not anything to do with management consultaants, whom Mr O’Leary once said he would shoot if they ever darkened his doorstep. Nor was it due to pressure from the board.

Instead, the trigger was people who periodically accost him in McDonald’s to moan about his airline while he sits trying to enjoy a meal with his kids. As he said to shareholders at last week’s annual meeting, he is sick and tired of it.

So never mind big data. When it comes to bringing about change it is criticism delivered in person by random strangers that counts. Mr O’Leary is unusual in many ways, but in this one I suspect he is just like the rest of us.

On the face of it, placing so much emphasis on such meetings is irrational. The people who bearded him were surely no more disaffected than the thousands who for years have been posting their hostilities online. In the brief time since I started writing this article, several dozen angry tweets have been written, including this one, which I rather like: “That £50-100 difference between Ryanair and BA is taken not from your wallet, but from your soul.”

Such stuff is both endless and up there for the world to see, and yet turns out to be easier for executives to ignore than half a dozen cross customers they meet in person.

You might have expected that, as the virtual world has grown and data proliferated, the value of the real encounters would have shrunk, but the reverse seems to be happening. The more bewildering the virtual world, the more we fall back on “real” evidence, no matter how subjective, preasented by strangers under our own noses.

It is not just Mr O’Leary who puts disproportionate weight on chance meetings while he is eating his supper. Richard Dawkins recently told The Times that he realised atheists such as him had won the battle over God because at the dinner parties he goes to he no longer meets anyone religious. When even scientists trust the anecdotal evidence of the dinner party more than data, you know something pretty fundamental has happened.

Just now I bumped into a fellow columnist. I was about to explain to him my theory about the inflated trust we place in face-to-face encounters but before I could open my mouth he started boasting. He told me he had just got back from the US where he had been stopped twice by perfect stranagers, once in a bookshop and once in an airport, both of whom told him they loved his writing. There was no need for me to ask his view of my theory: he was providing me with living proof of it. This man gets a vast amount of adulation on email and Twitter, but by comparison to the real thing, they do not touch him at all.

Yet if praise delivered in person by strangers is powerful, criticism delivaered in the same way is even more so. I can remember exactly the dinner party I went to about 15 years ago, when a fellow guest who I had never met before looked me in the eye and said that she thought my columns were fatuous. I can remember the food, what I was wearing – everything.

This sort of thing is memorable partly because it is so unusual. Most people do not relish being nasty in person: we have all been brought up to be polite to strangers, especially if we are breaking bread with them.

By contrast, on the internet our upbringing is non-existent. No one seems to think there is anything wrong with being gratuitously horrible – so long as we cannot be seen. So the dinner party/McDonald’s test may not be unscientific after all. The person who approaches an off-duty chief execuative to complain is not just another internet troll. They are someone who really means it and really wants an answer.

The executive is then put on the spot, in a way that almost never happens in the course of a normal day in the office. At a dinner party or at McDonald’s there is no PR person at hand to draft a sanitised reply. There are no underlings to delegate the tricky question to. There is no time to think it through: a convincing answer needs to be given in public, then and there.

This means that the test set by the angry fellow diner is invaluable. If the chief executive cannot muster a good defence, then it suggests that Mr O’Leary’s response is the only honourable one. A U-turn is signalled.

Profits are the route to sustainable business

By Andrew Hill

Ask chief executives to make controversial public statements about their core business and they tend to be shy. I know this because I spent a few years trying to coax them into print as editor of the FT’s comment page. But provide them with an opening to tell the world about their sustain-ability initiatives and they are often impossible to shut up.

The UN Global Compact and consultants Accenture have just given 1,000 of them their triennial opportunity to sound off, in what they say is the largest ever chief executive study on sustainability. But the noise the world’s bosses are making is a depressing cacophony of moaning and self-congratulation: two-thirds of them think business is not doing enough to meet environmental, social and governance challenges, but three-quarters are satisfied with the speed and effectiveness of their own companies’ sustainability drive.

The study’s authors are polite. It would not do to alienate business leaders who are committed, through the global compact, to promote core values in important areas such as human rights and the fight against corruption. They refer to the “frustrated ambition” of chief executives who have now reached a “plateau” on their ascent to a more sustainable future.

This is, however, a plateau where most chief executives will be happy to pause for a while. The proportion who regard sustainability as “very important” to their companies’ future has dropped since 2010 and 83 per cent of them are looking for governments to help pull them up to the next level. In short, they are about as “frustrated” as climbers who look up from their warm tents to see their more adventurous rivals clinging desperately to the rock face as a storm closes in on the summit.

Self-interest is, as it always has been in the area of corporate social responasibility, a great motivator. Carlos Brito, chief executive of AB InBev, says in the study: “Embedding sustainability is easier when it makes sense as the right thing to do and makes business sense.” But as Gavin Patterson, new chief executive of BT, told me last week, other companies have recently “deprioritised” some of their sustainability ambitions: in western economies, at least, “on the face of it, there have been more pressing things to worry about, [such as] paying the bills”.

Many still whine that two of their most important constituencies – cusatomers and investors – are equivocal about the benefits of pushing on. Even pioneers sometimes send a mixed message. Siemens wins praise from the UN report for its clean energy initiatives, which helped make eco-friendly products and services its fastest growing business last year. Yet in July an avalanche of shareholder and board anxiety about profit warnings and narrowing margins swept away Peter Löscher, the German company’s chief executive.

But these are easy excuses. The business case to take bolder steps is becoming stronger. Ioannis Ioannou of London Business School has coaauthored a study showing that a consistent sustainability strategy leads to better long-term operational and stock market performance. He says the UN report is good news. At a few companies, frustration will lead to innovation – as it did when manufacturers first sought to reduce the size of mainframe computers and widen the market – while those that fail to adapt will be overtaken.

To progress, the fastest climbers must collaborate more closely with supapliers and customers. To promote a “circular economy”, they need to design and build kit – from a BT router to a Philips lighting system – for recycling and reuse. To improve trust, they need to show that radical plans – such as Syngenta’s counter-intuitive new programme to encourage farmers to do more with less of the pesticide and fertiliser it sells – are more than mere “greenwash” and do yield benefits for the company, the customer and the community.

As with any innovation, chief executives require courage to make this sort of leap. But they need something else as well: a determination to prove publicly that common sense and business sense on sustainability are one and the same.

One chief executive quoted in the UN study puts it well: “Business is absolutely not doing enough: we’re being held back by timidity, by a lack of understanding, by a lack of a more holistic approach.” By the time the 2016 report comes out, perhaps he or she will have the guts not to remain anonymous.

Mandela’s lessons in how to negotiate

By Michael Skapinker

Assessments of Nelson Mandela’s achievements rightly focus on his talent for the conciliatory gesture and South Africa’s relative post-apartheid peace and institutional stability. (If you contest the last two, compare the country with Syria, Egypt or even Russia.)

Less often discussed are the long negotiations that produced a political settlement. They are worth recalling as Israelis and Palestinians return to tentative talks.

And, although similarities between politics and business should not be overdone, anyone involved in negotiations, whether between unions and management, or over a corporate merger, or even an office desk reshuffle, should consider the lessons of South Africa’s transition.

What are they? • Know your pre-negotiation strengths and weaknesses. In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Mr Mandela recalled evaluating his position and that of the African National Congress from his prison cell. A military victory over the white government was “a distant if not impossible dream”.

So where did his negotiating strength come from? What could he offer that would persuade his adversary to concede?

We get the answer from that adversary’s autobiography. In The Last Trek

– A New Beginning, FW de Klerk, South Africa’s last apartheid president, outlined what persuaded him that a deal with the ANC was necessary. He, too, realised outright military victory was impossible. South Africa’s interanational isolation was holding back growth. Its companies needed access to world markets. The advent of democracy would bring international legitimacy. “The government had the power and the authority and the ANC the numbers,” Mr de Klerk wrote. • You don’t need to be friends with the people on the other side of the table, but you do need to keep talking. A startling feature of Mr de Klerk’s autobiography is his constant complaint about how little of Mr Mandela’s famous forgiveness and reconciliation he felt were directed towards him. The two argued frequently over the vioalence that plagued the country between Mr Mandela’s release in 1990 and the first democratic election in 1994.

After one acrimonious exchange, Mr de Klerk slammed the phone down on Mr Mandela. Yet they made sure that contact, between themselves or their teams, continued. “We would both frequently have to rise above our perasonal antipathy,” Mr de Klerk said. • Don’t pay too much attention to what the other side says in public. Negotiations, whether in politics or business, are often accompanied by posturing, designed both to reassure supporters and to put pressure on the other side. In a speech in Cape Town immediaately after his release, Mr Mandela upset many whites by reaffirming his commitment to armed struggle and to the ANC’s alliance with the South African Communist party.

There was a reason for that. Mr Mandela knew many in the ANC were suspicious of his talks with the government while in prison. “I was aware that they had heard rumours that I had strayed from the organisation, that I was compromised, so at every turn I sought to reassure them.”

For his part, Mr de Klerk said that Felipe González, who became Spain’s prime minister after fighting the Franco dictatorship, had warned him the ANC “would say one thing at the negotiating table one day, and something completely contradictory the next day in public”. • Focus on the other side’s bottom line. Mr de Klerk knew that democratic elections would almost certainly bring the ANC to power. Mr Mandela understood that Mr de Klerk needed to assure whites that they wouldn’t be crushed in the new South Africa. The key to an agreement came when the ANC proposed a power-sharing government for five years and the honouring of the mostly white civil servants’ contracts.

Mr de Klerk said he was happy to have ensured that the new South Africa ended up with a liberal constitution and a free-market economy. But he did not achieve his hope of a rotating presidency.

Once elections had happened, Mr Mandela saw the need to ensure that whites and other minorities felt secure. “From the moment the results were in and it was apparent the ANC was to form the government, I saw my mission as one of preaching reconciliation.”

This is the final negotiating lesson: • Try to ensure the other side doesn’t feel it has lost.

Management – overview

By Andrew Hill

Peter Drucker, who did more than most to promote the study of modern management, once pointed out that when Karl Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels was running a mill in the 19th century, its 300 employees had no managers as such, only “charge hands” who enforced discipline on “proletarians”.

As Drucker wrote in The New Realities (1989) management’s “fundamental task” is to “make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and develaopment they need to perform and to respond to change”. Management, he continued, explains why “for the first time in human history, we can employ large numbers of knowledgeable, skilled people in productive work”.

In other words, “management” has a fair claim to be the most revoluationary business idea of the past 150 years – if only managers could pin it down and apply it.

Harvard Business Review has dubbed the years between 1911 – when Frederick Winslow Taylor published his book The Principles of Scientific Management – and 2011 “The Management Century”. Taylor’s breakathrough was to see that production line productivity could be improved by using “scientific” methods of organisation.

The approach has been criticised for imposing a mechanistic regime on workers in the interests of pure efficiency, but it triggered more research into psychological and sociological ways to make manufacturing more productive.

Plenty of management techniques have helped to improve the ability of managers to fulfil their fundamental task. China-based car manufacturers, for example, are using the production line efficiency methods pioneered by Japan’s Toyota and others.

But the overarching management ideas that have shaped the way in which people run any large organisation – and plenty of small ones – are mostly broader and less changeable.

The FT judges chose leadership, ethics, strategic management and the spread of business educators and advisers for the list of the 50 big busianess ideas. But we steered clear of singling out individual management theories.

Even successful management theories, such as those espoused by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman in In Search of Excellence or by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in Built to Last, tarnish with time, as the companies studied fail to keep up with the latest business trends.

Management writers would love to think that their ideas shape business. Some theories, including those mentioned above, did affect managers’ thinking and practice, particularly between 1990 and 2000 as globalisation took hold. But unlike solid inventions that can be installed and put to work until the next upgrade – such as fibre optics, robotics or the microchip – “management” is a concept which users must constantly reshape to meet new organisational challenges.

As Charles Handy, the veteran management thinker, now in his 80s, told the FT in a recent interview: “The most that I can do is to cast [managers’] problems and opportunities in a different light so they see them more clearly. But what they do about it and what the answers are, no, I don’t have them. So I’m never going to have three rules for success, or this is the answer to leadership ... that’s impertinent and bound to be wrong anyway most of the time because ... every problem is different.”

The multilingual dividend

By Andrew Hill

Speaking two or more languages develops cognitive skills that are ideal for top managers, writes Andrew Hill

Afew years ago, when Antonella Sorace visited the European Central Bank in Frankfurt to talk about her research into bilingualism, she was astonaished to find the bank’s multinational staff worrying about what should have been one of their families’ principal assets. “They had all kinds of doubts about the benefits of multilingualism for their children; they worried that their children weren’t learning to read or write properly – in any language,” she says. “I found it very instructive.”

The Italian-born University of Edinburgh professor of developmental linguistics should set their minds at rest. Prof Sorace’s research has shown that speaking another language offers not only utilitarian comamunication advantages, but also has cognitive benefits. Her message to business is: “Hire more multilingual employees, because these employees can communicate better, have better intercultural sensitivity, are better at co-operating, negotiating, compromising. But they can also think more efficiently.”

Big multinational companies recognise the importance of language skills. McKinsey counts more than 130 languages spoken across the management consultancy, and offers a bursary to those who wish to learn another language before joining. Unilever estimates that up to 80 of the consumer products group’s 100 most senior leaders speak at least two languages. Standard Chartered seeks out bilinguals for its international graduate training scheme.

These companies understand the functional benefits of having enough Mandarin-speakers to deal with suppliers in Shanghai, or French speakers sufficiently fluent to smooth relations with a customer in Carcassonne.

But at a recent FT roundtable in partnership with Bilingualism Matters, a project led by Prof Sorace, executives and consultants said they also believed that companies benefited from the diverse background and skills of multilingual leaders – and would benefit more in future.

“Multilingualism will be better valued and better leveraged by companies,” says Laurence Monnery, co-head of global diversity and inclusion at Egon Zehnder, the executive search company. “Multiculturalism makes better leaders.”

“Do multilinguals make better managers?” asks Ann Francke, chief execuative of the UK’s Chartered Management Institute. “Probably the answer to that question is yes.”

Research shows bilinguals have an enhanced awareness of other peoaple’s points of view, born from their deeper understanding, from an early age, that some people have a different perspective. They are also better than monolinguals at giving selective attention to specific features of a problem, while ignoring misleading elements, and at switching between different tasks. Prof Sorace points out that bilinguals do not switch off their “other” language, meaning their brains grow to be more adaptable than those of monolinguals – a vital asset in a complex business world.

Most companies still value the practical rather than cognitive advantages of employing linguists. HSBC is one of the world’s most multinational empaloyers and emphasises hiring and cultivating multilingual staff. But Jorge Aisa Dreyfus, the Spanish-born co-head of learning, talent, resourcing and organisational development, says the bank is “probably still paying too much attention to [the fact] that you speak German, so you [can] handle all my German business”.

In any case, for many companies from English-speaking cultures, pressure to employ a multilingual workforce has eased as English has spread as the language of business.

Academics worry that this will make national policy makers and educators complacent. James Foreman-Peck of Cardiff Business School has assessed the cost to the UK economy of under-investment in language skills as “the equivalent of between a 3 and 7 per cent tax on British exports”. A recent study by the British Academy on “the state of the nation” concluded that the UK was entering a “vicious circle of monolingualism”.

While the problem is particularly acute in the UK, other countries are also concerned. A 2006 report for the European Commission stated that “a significant amount of business” was sacrificed because of poor language skills across Europe: 11 per cent of small- and medium-sized enterprises had lost a contract as a result.

Prof Sorace says the cognitive benefits of multilingualism can be acquired by adults who become proficient in a second language. But a downward spiral in the quality of language education undermines the potential to develop that proficiency.

Richard Hardie, who chairs UBS’s London operation, says the Swiss bank’s recruitment website used to specify that it was looking for language skills. But it had to drop the requirement as the quality of linguists it was interaviewing fell.

Multinationals have the edge over smaller companies in being able to recruit bilinguals globally, or to give staff with language skills full- immerasion assignments.

Will Dawkins, of executive search firm Spencer Stuart, says “most enlightaened companies” look for candidates for senior jobs who are not only multilingual but also have “performed a significant leadership task in another language”.

Doug Baillie, chief human resources officer of Unilever, agrees: “Our most successful leaders are the ones who speak more than one language and travel to more than one geography.”

But big companies can sometimes be complacent. Tracey Roseborough, managing director, international, at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, saw the advantages of multilingualism when working with high-potential managers at Standard Chartered, earlier in her career, but says the quality of language skills at some big American multinaationals she has worked for has not matched up. “The quality of the conversations wasn’t the same,” she says.

Prof Sorace advises companies to help combat prejudice and misconaceptions about bilingualism and to exploit the opportunity to integrate expatriates into their local communities, to the advantage of the employees themselves and their families.

But her principal concern remains the failure of education systems – notably in the UK, whose citizens rank last out of EU members in linguistic ability – to promote languages at school. Add the cognitive disadvantage that monolinguals suffer to the more obvious communication deficit and countries’ neglect of languages translates into a tale of lost potential.

Get a business brain

• Bilingualism does not mean perfect, balanced fluency in two languages from birth. Bilinguals are people who know, and use regularly, more than one language.
• Early exposure to two languages does not disadvantage children and may bring benefits, such as flexible thinking. The cognitive benefits apply from childhood to old age.
• No languages are “more useful” or “less useful”: what matters is having more than one language in the brain.
• Starting early is good for developing cognitive ability, but proficiency and number of languages matter more than age of first exposure to the second language.
• “Late” bilinguals who are proficient in their second language also have cognitive advantages.

Source: Bilingualism Matters ‘Our most successful leaders are those who speak more than one language’

I’ve finally found a piece of good corporate guff

By Lucy Kellaway

Why is it, readers often ask, that I never write about good corporate comamunication, but serve up an unvaried diet of bad.

There are three reasons for this. The first is that the negative is deeply rooted in my psyche. The second is because most of us like reading about guff as it’s funnier and makes us feel superior. And the third is an almost complete absence of supply of the good stuff.

For one week only, I’m changing the pattern. Last week I came by chance on some startlingly sharp business writing, made even more freakish as it was in an area where communication is invariably dismal – statements of values and purpose. But before settling down to extol it, I can’t resist a small fix of guff, as a reminder of how bad things have become.

Last week Barclays declared that its new purpose was: “Helping people achieve their ambitions – in the right way.” On the positive side, the words are nice and short and it’s encouraging that after 300 years the bank has decided that the right way is better than the wrong one.

The only snag is that it is hogwash. The purpose of a bank is nothing to do with ambition. It is, as I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, to keep deposiators’ money safe and to lend it to people who aren’t going to run off with it.

The bank went on to state that staff will be rewarded according to “how they live our Values and bring them to life every day. And we’ll judge our ‘Go-To’ success on a balanced scorecard of impact.”

Thus Barclays establishes itself as the “Go-To” place for two things: corpoarate marshmallow and incorrect use of upper case.

Now compare this to Our Credo from Johnson & Johnson, four paragraphs laying out the medical group’s priorities. As I read it I got so excited, I resolved to track down the man who wrote this exemplary piece of corpoarate prose. After a bit of searching, I found him.

His name is Robert Wood Johnson. There is only one thing wrong with him: he’s dead. It turns out that the statement was written in 1943, long before corporate guff was invented, but the company has sensibly hung on to it.

It begins: “We believe our first responsibility is to the doctors nurses and patients ... who use our products.”

This is a strong start. There is none of the modern corporate pretence that the interests of all “stakeholders” point in the same direction. Instead, customers come first. The products, it goes on to say, should be of “high quality”. Not excellent, or world-class, or any other overinflated tosh. Just “high”.

The company’s next priority is to its employees. “We must respect their dignity and recognise their merit,” it states. “They must have a sense of security in their jobs”, feel able to make suggestions, and their pay must be “fair and adequate”. This is exceptional stuff. No dreary waffle about fun or engagement, no passion, no talent. Just the stuff that matters.

But now for the best bit of all: “We must provide competent management, and their actions must be just and ethical.” I have never seen this in a statement before. For a company to promise to manage itself competently is, to slip into current language, a very big ask. A big hairy audacious stretch goal.

The third duty is to the community. “We must be good citizens – support good works and charities and pay our fair share of taxes.” Starbucks etc, take heed.

Shareholders take their place at the back of the queue. “When we operate according to these principles, the stockholders should realise a fair return.” On reading this credo, I find that I believe, too. I enthusiastically sign up to this sort of capitalism.

Alas, since Our Credo was written, there has been some slippage. On Johnson & Johnson’s website are examples of “Credo in Action”, with dismal, modern mentions of a “Diverse Inclusive Leadership Pipeline” and the “employee experience”.

Sadder still is that for all its credo, Johnson & Johnson doesn’t noticeably exceed the undemanding standards set by other drug companies. In recent years, jobs haven’t always been secure, and customers haven’t always been looked after. Only last week there was a story about executives from the company being investigated for allegedly bribing doctors in Greece.

There may be a good reason companies talk flatulently about helping people meet their ambitions and “Go-To” success. Because if they don’t live up to such waffly principles, no one will ever know.

If you have to reject me, tell it to me to straight

By Lucy Kellaway

Last December, Elly Nowell was interviewed for a place at Magdalen College, Oxford to study law. When she got home, she sat down and comaposed a letter to the ancient institution. “I very much regret to inform you that I will be withdrawing my application,” she wrote. “I realise you may be disappointed by this decision, but you were in competition with many fantastic universities and following your interview I am afraid you do not quite meet the standard of the universities I will be considering.”

This 19-year-old girl has taught me two important things about rejection letters. First is how well they work in the wrong direction: from candidate to interviewer. To have the powerless rejecting the powerful not only does the soul a great deal of good, it may make sense tactically. To dump a complacent boyfriend is a time-honoured ploy; I don’t see why the same shouldn’t work with jobs and university places.

If there is anyone with any spark in Magdalen’s law faculty they will surely be regretting this plucky, funny girl who got away. (Though perhaps wondering if law, that dullest of all dull courses, was right for her.)

Second, by mimicking the standard rejection letter, Ms Nowell reveals what a pathetic form of communication it is. Patronising, disingenuous, all-round beastly. There is only one accepted way of writing these things, used by all organisations everywhere, and it contains three bits that go like this. “Thank you for your interest in,” they all begin. “We have had a record number of highly qualified applicants and regret that ...” And then, an upbeat ending: “We wish you all the best for your future.”

All three elements are shockers; far from softening the blow they intensify it. First, as a reject, you don’t want to be thanked for your “interest”, as what you were showing wasn’t interest, but desire for a position. Neither is it remotely comforting to know how many other great applicants there were. Worst of all, no one appreciates hollow good wishes from someone who is telling them to shove off.

When putting rejection into words, less is more. When one of my children was rejected from a university it was less upsetting to see the naked word UNSUCCESSFUL against the entry on the online application form than to read the letter that arrived a couple of days later with its bad tidings routinely packaged with insincere good wishes.

One might think there were nicer ways of saying no. Howard Junker, the founder of literary magazine ZYZZYVA, used to return short stories with a covering letter that began: “Gentle writer, Please forgive me for returning your work and not offering comments. I would like to think of something to make up for my ungraciousness, but I don’t think a few quick remarks would really help.” He signed off with a handwritten, “Onward! J”.

How charming, I thought. But then I read a blog from a not-so-gentle writer who had received the very same letter on many occasions and found it anything but charming. The point is that no standardised letter can ever soften any blow. Rejection is rejection and it hurts.

Indeed, sometimes a brutal rejection is better. Actor Sir Antony Sher often describes the letter he got from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art that said: “Not only have you failed the audition and we do not want you to try again, but we seriously recommend that you think about a different profession.”

Similarly, about 30 years ago a senior colleague of mine applied for a job at the Economist and got a rejection letter back from the editor’s secretary asking him not to contact the editor again. Such rudeness can only make the recipient think “screw you” and fill them with just the right sort of bloody mindedness to fight on until they make it.

The only worthwhile kind of rejection letter is one that gives reasons. Ms Nowell told Magdalen that she thought it stuck up and off-putting to candidates who didn’t come from posh schools, a point the college might do well to ponder.

In offering an explanation she wasn’t mimicking the normal style: employers almost never give reasons for fear of being sued, or because they don’t want to enter into a dispute, or because their hiring processes are so opaque they don’t know the explanation themselves.

The best rejection letter I ever received contained a reason I will never forget. I had written to a Mr Ivan Sallon, City editor of the Sunday Telegraph, asking for a job. He replied saying that there were no vacancies and went on: “May I offer you a word of advice? When applying for a job, do take care to get names right.” The letter was signed: Ivan Fallon.

The value of mentors who have been there

By Michael Skapinker

The vagaries of Cape Town’s trains have made Mpho Mbhele an hour late, but it does not take long for a smile to replace her flustered apologies. She is a vital presence, a picture of health, and looks younger than her 41 years.

She is also HIV-positive, having been infected by her former husband who then threw her out. She has lost one of her three children to Aids.

It is a common story. Three-quarters of the world’s HIV-positive pregnant women live in 12 African countries, including South Africa. At Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, 8,000 HIV-positive women give birth each year. This is more than in the whole of the US. Untreated, 40 per cent of those women will give birth to infected babies.

It does not have to be that way. Ms Mbhele is one of an army of HIV-positive mothers who persuade pregnant women to take an Aids test, advise them to submit to the treatment that will help ensure their babies are born healthy and then support them if they need antiretroviral drugs to stay alive to look after their children.

These “mentor mothers” work for an organisation founded in 2001 by Mitchell Besser, an American obstetrician whom I first met when he was an undergraduate in the 1970s. Mothers2mothers (m2m) operates in seven African countries, employing 1,475 mentors and site co-ordinators who deal with 78,000 women each month.

Dr Besser set up m2m after his frustration, while working at a Cape Town hospital, at how few pregnant women agreed to be tested for HIV and how little time he and his nurses had to counsel those who did take the test and proved positive.

The mentor mothers not only help to compensate for the dire African shortage of doctors and nurses. Pregnant women are also more likely to listen to HIV-positive women who have had children themselves.

That the mentors look so well is one of the keys. When I visited a clinic in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal in 2010, the chubby-cheeked mentors made a strong contrast with the drawn and coughing patients.

The mentors, who are trained and paid a salary, provide the answer to the many women who say they don’t want an HIV test because they don’t want to discover that they are going to die. “Do I look like I’m dying?” the mentors ask.

Their other central role is helping defeat the HIV stigma. Speaking in m2m’s central Cape Town office, Ms Mbhele waves away my question of whether she minds her name appearing in a newspaper published worldawide. She doesn’t believe people should hide being HIV-positive. Women who come to the two clinics she supervises aren’t all as brave about their status. “They say ‘we can’t disclose like you’,” she says.

She knows what it is like. It took her time to tell people she had HIV. She knows, too, that antiretroviral tablets, while life-saving, are not easy to take. “Three in the morning, three in the evening. It’s very hard to remember,” she says. There can be side effects. For three months at the beginning, she suffered numbness in her leg. But she tells the mothers that they have a duty to their children. “I say, ‘You must live long, you must take your ARVs.’”

These mentoring lessons apply elsewhere too, including in business. Dr Besser says patients are often readier to listen to their peers than to supaposed authority figures. He also asks whether, with health costs under pressure in both developed and developing countries, doctors and other medical professionals are always the most effective deliverers of care. As populations age, isn’t there a role, for example, for the more robust elderly to support those whose health has declined?

Peer mentoring exists elsewhere; Alcoholics Anonymous is a leading example of people who have changed their lives supporting others who are struggling to do so.

What of companies? A 2007 review of the research literature into corpoarate mentoring by Barry Bozeman and Mary Feeney of the University of Georgia shows it is overwhelmingly seen as something senior people do for their juniors. “A mentor is generally defined as a higher-ranking, influenatial individual in your work environment who . . . is committed to providing upward mobility and support in your career,” is a typical example.

There is a role for people like that, although they might better be called sponsors than mentors. As with the mentor mothers, someone who started where you are would surely be more credible and effective.