Choose your own adventure, career edition

Hello and welcome to Working It, the FT’s weekly newsletter on work life and leadership.

The FT Weekend Festival on Saturday was a joy 🤩. Thank you to all the Working It readers who said hello, and asked great questions in live sessions.

We also interviewed 🎥, accountant and personal finance educator, Abigail Foster, aka That Finance Girl. It’s for the next Working It film, which explores the creator economy and building a personal brand; Abi has done that very successfully — and pivoted out of her corporate job as a result. Film coming later this month 🗓️.

Read on for new advice on longevity at work and in life.

Weave yourself a better future 🧺

Many readers will remember Lynda Gratton’s 2016 book, The 100-Year Life, co-authored with Andrew Scott. It sold millions of copies worldwide and kicked off a much-needed conversation about longer working lives. Lynda, who is professor of management practice in organisational behaviour at London Business School, now summarises the book’s message as “really an economic database argument to say, ‘you’re living longer, you probably haven’t saved. You probably don’t want to be poor when you’re old. Therefore, you need to be working longer’ 🧓🏽.”

A decade on, Lynda has written Living the 100-Year Life, believing that more of us are ready for a very practical guide, saying, “this book is very much more based on stories and experiences”. She proposes a framework of eight different elements, through which we are “weaving” our lives. Living the 100-Year Life, above all, invites us to notice how we choose to spend our time, and, if necessary, think about changing that focus.

I took Lynda’s free initial “diagnostic” (available here — it takes a few minutes), designed to help “understand the shape of your life, as it is now”. There are, Lynda explains, eight “threads” holding our individual weave together, and in each we may be stronger (foundational), in progress or transition (renewing) or weaker (fragile).

Four of the threads cover aspects of our personal productivity, “and that’s really important right now, because if you want a job . . . or want to do something different, you need strong productivity threads”. Examples include mastery and co-operation. The other four span, broadly, nurturing and relationships, including our relationship with technology, which Lynda calls “amplifying”.

In the absence of clear career paths for many older people, especially those who are leaving corporate life (voluntarily, or otherwise), new frameworks for planning and self-reflection are much needed. Lynda aims to bring “agency into people’s lives” at times of great uncertainty 🫤.

A second new book, Expiry Date Never: Age is the New Superpower, also proposes a framework for career transition and later-life flourishing. Co-authored by Victoria Tomlinson and Louise Ballard, the book suggests that AI can play a key role in helping people to work out what comes next. Their formula is: “find it, own it, connect it”.

Victoria outlines what those three steps mean in practice. First, “find” what the market wants. Victoria’s organisation, Next-Up, often works with professional services professionals before they transition out of their firms. Many of them aspire to take on non-executive directorships — an obvious path, but there are many others they often don’t know about. She says: “Rather than asking AI ‘what jobs could I do?’, use it to interrogate the future market. What is growing? What problems are emerging? Where will skills be needed?”

“Own it” means building visible authority in your chosen area, including having conversations with experts, and using AI to deepen your knowledge. “Then you need to tell people what you are good at — particularly through LinkedIn — and build visibility and credibility around it.”

The final step, “connect it”, involves mapping your networks, including workplaces, school, university, community: Victoria wants us to include everything and everyone. “AI can help us reconstruct and map that lifetime of contacts and think about who might connect with the future market we have identified.”

A clue to our next act? Think about how you read a physical newspaper or news websites, Victoria says: “Where do you go first in the newspaper 🗞️? What do you listen to first on the radio?”

• In a nutshell: Replace the “linear” career path with a new planning framework in order to play to your strengths, and avoid a “cliff edge” when you leave corporate life.

In a nutshell: Replace the “linear” career path with a new planning framework in order to play to your strengths, and avoid a “cliff edge” when you leave corporate life.

• Want more? Lynda Gratton’s HBR article, “The Predictable Executive Career Arc Is Over”.

Want more? Lynda Gratton’s HBR article, “The Predictable Executive Career Arc Is Over”.

AI Clinic 🩺

The problem: The volume of “stuff” I get from colleagues has rocketed. They generate endless reports, summaries longer than actual meetings and so on. I have to wade through this “slop”. How can I fight back against indiscriminate use of AI? I don’t have managerial leverage but I don’t want to deal with documents they don’t check properly. Colleagues express delight with AI saving them time and effort. Now the effort is all mine.

The answer: I hear versions of this problem all the time — it’s very much “of the moment” at this stage of AI adoption in many businesses. When AI saves time for one person, the danger is that a bottleneck of extra work is passed further down the chain to colleagues, exactly as you describe. How to stop it? I asked Mackenzie Howe, co-founder of AI adoption agency Atheni. She says that it’s a time-limited problem: this may not help you immediately, but “as AI literacy rises and the novelty of producing reams wears off, people settle down”. That’s a cheering thought.

Mackenzie has three practical tips for you, and anyone else dealing with colleagues’ slop 🗑️:

*Ask for key points by email: When something long arrives, go back with a warm reply: “This looks really thorough, thanks for the effort. Would you mind pulling the key points into the email itself? I'll turn to the document for detail when I need it.” This nudges people to refine before they send.

*‘Model it’ yourself: Send your own emails as a succinct covering note with a clear summary and actions; where you've done deeper work with AI, attach it, saying “details attached if useful”. This is the next step in good AI use.

*The real fix: most teams have never agreed what good AI use looks like, so everyone invents their own. Spend an hour together as a team, and come out with a simple set of shared rules for AI you can all live with.

This is the first instalment of “AI Clinic”, answering readers’ dilemmas and problems about AI at work — and sharing tech and productivity tips. Got an AI problem, tip or expert take? Email: [email protected].

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Who is Britain’s best CEO? You decide: An interactive CEO Performance Ranking allows FT readers to measure their desired weightings on FTSE 100 leaders’ performance, including reputation and commitment to women in leadership. Overall, the ranking demonstrates how few women are in top-level leadership 🤬.
2. AI is ushering in an era of mass toe-treading at work: Sarah O’Connor looks at the blurring of lines between jobs as AI takes on more of the work. In advertising, in particular, AI has profoundly changed the workflow.
3. The best, worst and strangest ways AI is really being used at work: FT reporters in different sectors look at how people are working with AI, including some weird tips: BP is using AI to predict how much coffee to stock in garage convenience stores.
4. Paul Smith at 80: The British designer still owns his company, and still works on the shop floor. Carola Long in HTSI celebrates his life and work, along with a photo shoot with celebrity friends. (Scroll the comments for a rather lovely poem from a fan.)
5. Inside John Lewis’s secret turnaround plan: Laura Onita goes deep into plans revealed to staff by Jason Tarry, chair of the partnership group. They include an ambition to link its various disparate loyalty schemes. (FT readers have many thoughts.)

Who is Britain’s best CEO? You decide: An interactive CEO Performance Ranking allows FT readers to measure their desired weightings on FTSE 100 leaders’ performance, including reputation and commitment to women in leadership. Overall, the ranking demonstrates how few women are in top-level leadership 🤬.

AI is ushering in an era of mass toe-treading at work: Sarah O’Connor looks at the blurring of lines between jobs as AI takes on more of the work. In advertising, in particular, AI has profoundly changed the workflow.

The best, worst and strangest ways AI is really being used at work: FT reporters in different sectors look at how people are working with AI, including some weird tips: BP is using AI to predict how much coffee to stock in garage convenience stores.

Paul Smith at 80: The British designer still owns his company, and still works on the shop floor. Carola Long in HTSI celebrates his life and work, along with a photo shoot with celebrity friends. (Scroll the comments for a rather lovely poem from a fan.)

Inside John Lewis’s secret turnaround plan: Laura Onita goes deep into plans revealed to staff by Jason Tarry, chair of the partnership group. They include an ambition to link its various disparate loyalty schemes. (FT readers have many thoughts.)

One more thing . . .

Previews of the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum have been the hottest tickets in town this week 🎟️. For the rest of us who weren’t invited, John Phipps has written an entertaining New Yorker article: “The Bayeux Tapestry’s Long Journey Home”.

A word from the Working It community

The recent newsletter on “recruiting going retro” discussed employers turning to human contacts and letters of recommendation rather than sifting through hundreds of identically polished AI applications. It brought in interesting responses, including from Hassan Akram, founder of Elite Careers Strategy. The firm offers a paid advisory service for graduates hoping to get a job in top-level law and financial services. (The tough employment market means the paid advice sector is booming — my colleague Emma Jacobs wrote about the phenomenon.)

Hassan has reviewed more than 10,000 job applications and suggests that employers should “rely more on proportionate work samples, structured interviews and live assessments that require candidates to explain and adapt their thinking”. He goes on to note that:

“There is a social-mobility risk. AI can democratise access to professional knowledge, but poorly designed live assessment may simply reward candidates who already understand elite professional norms. Polish is becoming abundant. Judgment is not.”

“There is a social-mobility risk. AI can democratise access to professional knowledge, but poorly designed live assessment may simply reward candidates who already understand elite professional norms. Polish is becoming abundant. Judgment is not.”

*Do watch our latest FT Working It film, “Are graduates prepared for the AI era?”

This week’s book giveaway 📚

Everyone is talking about uncertainty, and how to handle it. Kevin Fong’s new book, Minute Six: How High Performance Teams Navigate the Unknown, offers a compelling perspective: Kevin is a doctor specialising in anaesthesia and intensive care medicine; he’s responsible for major incident planning at London’s UCL Hospitals, and flies with the helicopter emergency medical service. Through examples from his own experience, and that of others who lead in extreme situations, he offers advice for others in non-frontline roles. I’ve started reading, and am already gripped 📖.

We have 10 copies to give away to Working It readers. Please enter on this form before 5pm on Friday September 18.