Mother, wife, board member - but still not a grown-up
Last week I joined the board of a medium-sized insurance company as a non-executive director. Until now
I have simply been a newspaper columnist who writes about paper clips, daft management initiatives and other office ephemera, so the news that I have landed a responsible position has attracted a certain amount of comment.
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You? people have asked. And then: Why?
It would not be seemly for me to say (even if I knew the answer) why the company has chosen me. I am glad it has, though. I am hoping that my seat on the board will give me a new and different view of the management themes that I have been writing about for so long. It may bring me a bit closer to those Financial Times readers who measure out their lives in meetings of this sort. Learning something about business from the inside may be a shock, but it will be new, and new things are rejuvenating. It will contribute to the school-fee budget, too.
You can't do that! people have said. What about conflicts of interest? I can see that for most journalists this could be a deal spoiler, but as I am a columnist who has no sway over other parts of the newspaper, as my subjects are paper clips and so on, and as I have never written about insurance and do not plan to start, I cannot see how there will be any conflict.
A more serious objection was raised by my husband, when I told him the happy news. First he laughed, and when he had stopped laughing, said: Now you'll have to be a real grown-up.
This thought unsettles me more than the knowledge that I am going to have to understand loss ratios and reserve releases (which, actually, I am making rather encouraging progress on). Can I be a proper grown-up? Will it matter if I find I can't?
Being a non-executive director is surely as grown up as it gets. You have to check the company's accounts. You keep an eye on the executive managers. You help them with strategy. If the executives have not been behaving, and if you have not been paying attention, then you can end up in prison. This job should therefore only be attempted by someone who feels grown up through and through.
Unfortunately, such a feeling has eluded me all my life. I thought it would come when I got my first job. It did not. Then I thought it would come when I got a mortgage, got married and had children. Still nothing.
Since then I have climbed the corporate ladder (after a fashion), bought a second home and even drive a Ford Galaxy, for goodness sake.
I have passed all these milestones, yet with no result.
It is not that I fancy I am young. I know I am 47 and that I am a responsible person, obsessively punctual and conscientious. I am also bossy and happy to tell off teenage boys in the street when they are misbehaving.
The not-quite-grown-up thing is instead an attitude of mind. It is about not taking oneself seriously. It is about never being quite settled, feeling that you have not arrived yet, and feeling that there is some grown-up club to which you do not belong, and maybe do not want to belong either. It is about living in a permanent state in which the question: "What do you want to be when you're grown up?" goes on making sense.
I am not alone in this. I know someone who is retiring this month who tells me he still has not worked out what he wants to do when he grows up. The fact that he is 59 makes no difference.
Some professions are stuffed with people who have not grown up. Journalists are hardly ever grown-ups, and neither are entrepreneurs. Sir Richard Branson and Steve Jobs surely do not think they are grown up. As for Bill Gates, it is hard to say: he is a nerd, which is neither quite man nor boy. In more conventional organisations a veneer of grown-upness is usually necessary to advancement. If your ambition is to be chief executive and you suffer from my problem, then you are going to need to pretend.
Which raises the possibility of a world full of pretenders: people who behave grown up every day at work, but deep down do not feel it. I have no idea how common this is, but last week I did a little experiment to help me find out.
On Thursday I went to the annual party of The Economist magazine. It was a supremely grown-up do: the room roared with the serious talk of government ministers, senior civil servants, spies and captains of industry.
I felt pretty grown up to be on the guest list at all, although made up for it by gulping down three glasses of champagne and, thus fuelled, going around asking the great and the good if they were grown-ups or not.
The response was not what I had expected. Of the non-journalists, more than one-third said that they did not feel grown up either.
Among them were the CEO of a well-known company, a leading City lawyer, the head of an academic institution and a top-ranking civil servant.
Of the grown-ups about half said that they had become that way as a result of family things (children, death of parents and so on) and the rest simply did not seem to get the question, and went off to talk to someone else.
Which leaves me not much wiser about whether my husband was right. Could my new position tip me over into grown-upness? It is early days.
I did feel a bit older after the first board meeting on Monday, but then feeling older and feeling grown up are not the same.
More encouragingly, I have decided that my husband is quite wrong to assume that being a grown-up is a prerequisite for being a decent non-executive director.
After all, one of the more important tasks of a non-executive is to speak up if faced with an executive emperor wearing no clothes. And the story tells us who does that task best: a child.
没长大的非执行董事
最
近我加入了一家中型保险公司的董事会，成了一名非执行董事。在这之前，我只是一个报纸专栏作家，只会写写文章，聊聊纸夹、愚蠢的管理创举以及其它一些办公室琐事。所以，我空降到一个负责任岗位的新闻很是引发了一些评论。
“你？”人们首先会这样问，接下来就是：“为什么？”
这家公司为什么选我？这个问题似乎不该由我来回答（即便我知道答案也是如此）。不过，我很高兴它选择了我。我希望，我在这个董事会的一席之地，将会让我更换一个全新的视角，观察我一直以来所写的管理问题。英国《金融时报》的一些读者整日参加这种董事会议，今后也许我会离他们更近一点。从内部了解些商业问题也许是一种震撼，但却是崭新的体验，而新事物总是会令人兴奋不已。而且，我也无须为此交学费。
“你不能那么做！”人们说，“有利益冲突怎么办？”我明白，对大多数记者而言，利益冲突问题可能是一个制肘因素，不过，由于我是一个对报纸其它部分没有影响的专栏作家，我所写的主题都是纸夹子之类的琐事，而且，由于我从来没写过关于保险的文章，将来也不打算写，所以，我看不出会有什么利益冲突。
更加严肃的反对来自我丈夫。当我告诉他这个好消息时，起初他哈哈大笑，笑完之后，他说道：现在你得做一个真正的成年人了。
这个想法让我感到不安，甚至比我获悉我需要弄懂赔付率和拨备回拨知识时更为不安。（实际上，我在那些知识上正取得可喜的进步）。我能成为一个真正意义上的成年人吗？如果我发现自己不能，会有什么关系吗？
要做一名非执行董事，你当然得是成年人。你得检查公司的账目，你得监督管理团队，你要在战略上协助他们。如果高管行为失当、而你又没有关注，那你就可能锒铛入狱。因此，尝试这种工作的，只能是那些觉得自己确确实实已经长大的人。
不幸的是，我一生中从未有过这种感觉。当我有了第一份工作的时候，我以为会有这种感觉，但它并没来；后来，当我按揭了房子，结了婚，生了孩子，我以为它就会来了。但它还是没来。
自那以后，我得到了晋升（虽然很勉强），买了第二套房子，甚至开上了福特银河(Ford Galaxy)，真是谢天谢地！我经历了所有这些具有标志性的事件，却仍没感到自己已经成年。
这不是我在幻想我很年轻。我知道，我47岁了，是一个负责任的人，特别守时，而且尽职勤勉。我还会专横而高兴地在街上斥责那些行为不端的十几岁男孩。
相反，“不够成年”是一种心态：不把自己当回事的，从未收住驿动的心，觉得自己还没有达到某种目标，觉得还有某个成年人俱乐部自己不能参加，或许也不想参加。在我的心里，有个问题始终萦绕不去：“你长大了想做什么？”
这样的人并非只有我一个。我认识一个将于本月退休的人，他告诉我，他仍然没有想清楚“长大以后想做什么”。虽然他已经59岁，但这并不代表什么。
有些职业充斥着“未成年”的人。新闻记者几乎从未长大过，企业家也是。理查德?布兰森爵士(Sir Richard Branson)和史蒂夫?乔布斯(Steve Jobs)肯定不会认为自己是成年人。至于比尔?盖茨(Bill Gates)就很难说了：他是个书呆子，既不是十足男人，也不完全是孩子。在更传统的组织中，要想得到提升，一种成年的表象通常很必要。如果你有志成为首席执行官(CEO)，而又身受我这个问题的折磨，那么，你就需要伪装了。
这就带来了一种可能，这是个充满伪装者的世界吗？每天在工作中表现得像成年人一样，内心深处却并未这么觉得。我不知道这种现象有多普遍，不过，前些天我做了一个小测验，来帮助自己找出答案。
那是9月7日，我参加了《经济学人》杂志(The Economist)的年度派对。这是一次最纯粹的成年人活动：喧闹的屋子里，政府大臣、高级公务员、商业间谍和工业统帅们进行着严肃的交谈。
单是被列在来宾名单中，我就觉得自己相当成年了，不过，为了完善这种感受，我吞下了三杯香槟，并借着酒劲儿，到处去问那些杰出人物，他们是否是成年人。
回答出乎我的意料。在记者除外的人当中，三分之一以上的来宾表示，他们觉得自己没有成年。
在这些人中，有一家知名公司的首席执行官、一位伦敦金融城首屈一指的律师、一个学术研究机构的负责人，还有一名高级公务员。
认为自己成年的人中，大约一半都表示，他们之所以变成了成年人，是因为与家庭有关的事件（例如生儿育女，或者父母去世等等），其余的人似乎没弄明白问题的含义，转头就跟其他人说话去了。
这些回答并未使我更明智地判断我丈夫正确与否。我的新职位能把我推向成年吗？现在想知道答案还太早。在参加过第一次董事会会议之后，我确实觉得自己老了一点，不过，觉得变老跟觉得成年并不是一码事。
比较令人鼓舞的是，我已经认定，我丈夫的想法大错特错了。他认为，要做一名得体的非执行董事，成年是一个前提。
毕竟，非执行董事更重要的任务之一，是在面对一个不穿衣服的“高管皇帝”时敢说真话。而“皇帝新装”的故事告诉我们，把这件差事做得最好的是一个孩子。
