Like many people of my generation (the over fifties), I have retired from work and will not be going back. This is why.
A friend of mine who is one, suggested I do some non-executive director work. I have a good enough CV, with a wide variety of operational and executive experience gained in global firms, emerging companies, and start-ups. I have line management experience in sales, marketing, project management, development, tech support and a good understanding of finance, administration and IT systems gained from selling them to global companies. I have run country and regional operations. Useful stuff.
Academically, I worked alongside Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman as a visiting fellow at KCL and Professor Tom Kirkwood (BBC Reith Lecturer) at Newcastle University. For both I brought bite, speed, and determination from startups to bear on projects that delivered value from their world leading academic efforts. UK universities massively underperform by comparison with the US when attempting to “spin out” academic knowledge into the economy. Someone with personal experience of fighting that battle (it’s mainly against internal enemies) would surely have something to contribute as a non-executive or advisor.
On projects, where the UK is world class at disaster, (can any country compete with our record for bringing them home late, over budget and failing to deliver their promised benefits?), I combined decades of industry experience of running successful projects with a postgraduate Masters at Oxford University that allowed me to see my career out by helping organisations take straightforward steps to avoid failure. I have been invited back to speak to master’s students at Oxford on this, and to organisations that turn to Oxford for help when they are about to start a high risk and strategically significant project.
I have published technical papers in serious journals and been invited to give lectures at conferences to real experts, including that most exclusive and intellectually superior audience – medical doctors – who I sucked up to by starting my lecture with “It’s not often I can say I am definitely the most stupid person in the room” before pistol whipping them with social “science” of why it is unethical to mandate compulsory prescription of statins to everyone over sixty, even if it would increase average life expectancy across “the herd”. If any of them had been familiar with Aristotle’s “The Rhetoric” they would have spotted they had been hit with the triangle (logos, pathos, and ethos) in the first sentence.
Finally, I am socially ok. I am not arrogant, domineering, greedy, power grabbing or any other toxic behaviour that we correctly associate with many “successful” people. I know how to operate in a team. I don’t want the glory. I derive enormous satisfaction from helping other people achieve their potential. I actually care about people!
Put that lot together and it’s a useful bag of spanners that could be turned to the advantage of many an organisation, and I would love to do it but I won’t.
The reason is the same one that I feel is responsible for people of my generation leaving business in droves to settle into early retirement. This is why we are turning our backs on business and waking away with all our knowledge and experience.
To go back, I would have to conceal my views on a set of subjects that would cancel me. In fact, if I mentioned them out loud HR might arrest me on the spot. Here they are a perfectly legal and reasonable spread of beliefs.
• I believe there are some situations where women who do not have a penis are entitled to separate treatment.
• I don’t believe all migration is good.
• I don’t believe all white people are racist.
• I believe scientific based knowledge is superior to cultural belief systems.
• I don’t believe it is ok for activists to break the law.
And, to cap it all, I voted for Brexit, and would like to say so, without suffering all the bigotry that follows from that. I am not a Daily Mail reader, little Englander, racist, xenophobe, populist, fascist, uneducated football hooligan, etc, etc. My concerns about EU membership stood me alongside Frank Field, who is in my judgement the most principled, social, and economic justice politician of the last fifty years.
Given a modicum of unemotional time and space I can explain and defend every one of these positions, while maintaining a pristine set of liberal democratic values. Unfortunately, that is not on offer. One word “off message” and the corporate response is swift and emotional. To use words such as “can we calm down and examine the evidence,” is provocative and is angrily dismissed as “thought policing.” by shoutie people who believe they have a moral monopoly and a right to be angry and offended.
It’s a shame but I no longer want to sit silently in the presence of HR and PR culture guardians. Somehow they have used DEI and ESG to capture CEOs and organisations. Dissent is career suicide. For me, as with most mature (both senses of the word) employees, survival became contingent on consistent, constant, vigilant self-censorship. I wouldn’t go back to that for all the tea in a global consumer goods company. Regaining the power of free speech is something I looked forward to in retirement and I don’t want to give it up.
It’s sad that even from the safety of retirement I hesitate to make these statements. But I have lost patience with the aggressive hostility towards people who are old, white, and male. If you met me at a bus stop or queueing in a shop you would find a nice, friendly, smiling, tolerant, supportive person who throughout his career has fought to open opportunities for people regardless of gender, ethnicity, religion, or class.
Back in 2016 I nearly laughed when I passed the Oxford University training course on “unconscious bias”. I found it funny because I had been invited to review the Oxford Admissions process after spending years criticising it for being biased against minorities. With this as my objective I found the training was influenced by the “White Fragility” works of Robin Diangelo, which is as bad as anything I have ever seen from Sociology. A stupendous achievement. It’s not that bias or racism doesn’t exist. It does and there is something of value in critical race theory and intersectionality, but the absolutism and malignant spite of this mob movement is unacceptable. Academic careerism and opportunism at its worst. It is too extreme. It goes too far. It is counterproductive. It reaches its peak of condescension and offensiveness in its treatment of Black people. This isn’t the way to build on progress against (real) racism. if I went back to work I would never be able to say such things.
As a part-time academic I devoted a lot of effort to applied work to reduce income inequality which I believe is tearing society apart and was the real cause of the Brexit protest vote. It exasperates me that the trendy, Johnny come lately diversity, equality and inclusion mob is now in control with its mission to make organisations “look good.” Looking good is the game, not being good. I have sat in rooms with top lawyers and their global clients when I have proved we can track pay inequality even down to the most intricate “intersectional” comparison in an instant with modern tech and at this news they stop the meeting. For all their high talk about diversity and equity, they don’t want to risk a legal “discovery” liability. In other words, they know they have skeletons in their cupboards and like to hide behind the defence that they haven’t heard that is possible to track them down at the press of a button. They want to look good not be good.
I have also dealt with DEI execs who petulantly demanded pay and job equity data on ethnicity. I have patiently requested definitions of ethnicity and been chastised for being obstructive when I wasn’t. I was just a systems person (albeit white, male, and old) who needed tight definitions to present valid data. We can provide analysis if you have the data and definitions. The trouble with ethnicity (as anyone who has done a DNA heritage test will know) is that there are not sharp biologically objective boundaries. Ethnicity, as presented by Diangelo et al, is actually a kind of subjective generalisation. There is no scientific test to accurately divide individuals into white and black or any other ethnicity. Everyone is a mix. Ethnicity definitions vary by country and culture and by national regulatory conditions. Unfortunately, raising such legitimate technicalities is “obstructive” in the Lewis Carrol world of HR or is it Violet Elizabeth Bot whose catchphrase at being told she can’t have what she wants is “I’ll scream and scream until I am sick,” either way it’s impossible to have a grown-up conversation. I want a definition for an ethnicity, they reply by saying “everyone knows”. Six year olds argue like this.
To supply one more example. Now HR systems can cope with more than two genders you might think that is job done. Put your tick where you identify. But, as systems persons, who have a wider data responsibility than simply making activists happy, we must think of the consequences now that the data has changed. Gender data is used in many ways besides determining which toilet you use, including by actuaries who calculate things such as life expectancy, and health insurance risks, which must then be priced and budgeted for. Putting a tick in a new box based on your self-identification today (or even part way through the day and back again tomorrow) undermines these calculations. That’s ok but we need to discuss how we accommodate that in a calm, logical, rational, quantitative way, except to suggest such a discussion will risk all the usual accusations of thought policing, micro-aggressions etc.
Anyway, you get the message. I am sorry that a lifetime of hard-earned experience is not available to help people who would benefit from it. And it’s not just me but also all those 50+ middle managers and trade and craft professionals who no longer want to spend every day tying their tongue in knots to avoid revealing their perfectly sensible and legitimate but unfashionable views.
