Negotiation in the age of the dual-career couple

Stefan Stern in The FT

To mark the recent centenary of the Harvard Business Review, editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius dipped into the archive and found, among other things, an article from 1956 titled “Successful Wives of Successful Executives”.

“It is the task of the wife to co-operate in working towards the goals set by her husband,” the article stated. “This means accepting — or perhaps encouraging — the business trips, the long hours at the office, and the household moves dictated by his business career.”

It got worse. The husband, the piece continued, “may meet someone who conforms more closely to the new social standards he has acquired while moving socially upward; he may discard his wife either by taking a new wife or by concentrating all his attention on his business.” Yuk.

The rise of the dual-career couple has transformed the politics of marriage since the 1950s but some tensions remain. A recently published book declares: “The most important career decision you’ll make is about whom to marry and what kind of relationship you will have.”

The words appear in “Money and Love: an Intelligent Road Map for Life’s Biggest Decisions”, written by Myra Strober, professor emerita at Stanford University, and Abby Davisson, a former executive at retailer Gap, and now a consultant.

The book takes a both/and rather than an either/or approach to the issues surrounding professional and domestic life. The authors reject an artificial notion of “balance”. Instead there are necessary, hard-headed but human trade-offs. “If you want lives that are not just two individuals pursuing career aspirations separately, then it takes a lot of negotiation and a lot of discussion, and compromise,” Davisson explained when I met the authors in London.

Strober led a course called “work and family” at Stanford’s graduate school of business (SGSB) for several decades until her retirement in 2018. She was one of the first female faculty members there on her appointment in the early 1970s.

“If I had proposed my course at the business school would be called ‘money and love’ instead of ‘work and family’ I would have had some pushback,” she told me. But wasn’t this in California in the days following the “summer of love”? “The business school was not buying that then either!” she noted.

Perhaps inevitably, in a book written by a business school professor and graduate, there is a checklist or framework to help the reader make better life decisions. These are the five Cs: to clarify what is important; to communicate effectively with a partner (or potential partner); to consider a broad range of choices, avoiding crude either/or decisions; to check-in with a sounding board of friends and family; and to explore the likely short-term and long-term consequences of any big decisions.

Actions will count as much as the thought processes that precede them.

Davisson said: “The mental models that we have, particularly from our parents, are incredibly powerful.” If you don’t see what an equal partnership looks like in your home, she added, it might be hard to imagine one.

“I have two boys,” she said, “and they see my husband as the head chef. They think it’s funny when I cook . . . They will have this model of us sharing the workload. All the home responsibilities do not fall on one person.”

During the Covid pandemic, employees, parents and carers had their roles blended as they worked from home and tried to keep family life going. For some that has been an opportunity to more equally share the domestic workload, for others it has made the mythical work/life balance harder to achieve.

The authors say more is needed. “We need to invest in excellent childcare,” Strober said. “This is something business leaders need to be thinking about.” Davisson added: “We see birth rates falling, people not wanting to fund the cost, and then we wonder why people are not having more children.”

Although Strober’s course was greatly valued by students — with men, incidentally, making up 40 per cent of participants — SGSB chose not to continue it after her retirement.

That risks the business school reverting to a too narrow focus on money and how to make it — without thinking about the human factor.

Strober is all too familiar with that split. She cites the 18th-century philosopher Adam Smith’s two books: The Wealth of Nations, which covers free markets and the workings of the economy; and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which focuses on social cohesion and relationships.

“Most people only know about The Wealth of Nations,” said Strober. “It’s too bad that he separated out those two books. Had he blended the discussion of wealth with the discussion of altruism we might not be quite so separated on them.”

We need both money and love. “Having money isn’t worth it unless you also have love,” Davisson said. And Strober’s final piece of advice? “The trick is to find someone to be your life partner who has the same philosophy as you do.”

'We knew we were going to be hit by a tsunami’: John McDonnell Interview

Source The Guardian

John McDonnell arrives with his shirt open at the neck. As the photographer sets up, he says: “I must put a tie on. I want to look respectable.” He rummages in his rucksack and draws out a tie of a very conservative deep blue. As he puts it on, the man who once declared his mission to be “generally fermenting the overthrow of capitalism” jokes: “I’m trying to look more like a central banker.”

This fellow veteran of the Bennite left is Jeremy Corbyn’s closest ally in a shadow cabinet that contains very few true friends of the new Labour leader.

The cartoonish version of his shadow chancellor is a belligerent, divisive, leftwing firebrand. He certainly has a history of incendiary rhetoric and he is unquestionably leftwing. He is not humourless and, if he can be abrasive, today he is doing his best to turn his most emollient face to the world.

He acknowledges that many senior Labour MPs were appalled by his appointment and influential trade union figures urged the Labour leader to make a less contentious choice. The rightwing press have raged against him even more than they have about the election of Corbyn himself. “It was a difficult decision for both him and me” and “we knew we were going to get a tsunami hit us.”

He is a man many love to hate. Why is that? He puts it partly down to “swimming against the tide” for all those decades when his brand of leftwing politics was despised and ignored by successive leaders of the Labour party. He reveals that his wife and family had their doubts about whether he should take it on: he had a mild heart attack two years ago. “I had warnings from them: ‘Come on, look, are you sure?’ But it had to be done.”

After many conversations with Corbyn, they concluded that they had to “ride the controversy” because it was essential that leader and shadow chancellor were as one on economic policy. “We didn’t want to go through a Blair–Brown era again where leader and chancellor are falling out all the time or what went on with Ed [Miliband] and Ed Balls. I think Jeremy’s point of view is ‘I’ve got to have someone who I one hundred percent trust.’ ”

The composition of the rest of the shadow cabinet, he argues, shows that they are not being militantly factional and are genuinely interested in having “a really broad-based team” representing all strands of Labour opinion. “As big a tent as we possibly can.” They started making overtures to people before it was announced that Corbyn had won and he is still appealing to some who quit the shadow cabinet for internal exile on the backbenches. He hopes that they will think again and cooperate on the development of policy. “I’m still having that conversation now with people to see if we can get them back into some role. I think we might be able to.”

Like who? “I would like Chuka [Umunna] to come back, desperately.” He mentions some more of those who have refused to serve. “Shabana Mahmood is a brilliant talent for the future. People like that I’d really like to get back. If we could get them back on board it will send a message that we really are a big tent.”

His friend’s debut week as leader has not been a smooth ride. Even sympathisers have been tearing out their hair over an often shambolic first seven days of unforced errors and forced U-turns which gifted a lot of ammunition to their many enemies in both the press and the Labour parliamentary party. McDonnell acknowledges that it has been “a bit rough” and puts the mistakes down to naivety. Whatever mutinous colleagues say to the contrary, he claims to be completely confident that his friend will lead Labour into the 2020 election.

His own appearance on Question Time involved two apologies. Once for saying that he wished he could have assassinated Margaret Thatcher – “an appalling joke”. And again for a notorious speech in which he commended the bravery and sacrifice of the IRA for using their bombs and bullets to bring “Britain to the negotiating table”. Some of the audience applauded his expression of regret. Others have found his explanation for the IRA speech – that he was praising them to try to sustain the peace process – utterly unconvincing. “I set up the all-party group on conflict prevention and conflict resolution. I chaired it,” he says, but acknowledges: “There’ll be some I’ll never convince.” Part of his problem with presenting himself as one of nature’s peacemakers is that he has a lot of form when it comes to suggesting political opponents should meet violent ends, talking about “lynching the bastard” in reference to the Tory Esther McVey and having “a recurring dream about garrotting Danny Alexander”.

He smiles: “I know.”

Where is that coming from? Liverpool, is his answer. “I’m from the north. You can take the boy out of the north but you can’t take the north out of the boy. I’m a plain speaker.”

Does the mellow version of McDonnell extend to having anything pleasant to say about the man he now shadows, George Osborne? “I’ve tried to get to a situation where you mature, where you don’t personalise your politics. But I go back to my constituency and you should come to my surgery some time, you’d sit down and weep. I have people begging me for a house. I’ve got families living in beds in sheds. Shanty places. So I think Osborne is cut off from the real world. I’m going to challenge him to come down to see them. What angers me is that they don’t have any understanding of the consequences of what they’re doing.”

This promises lively fireworks ahead when he clashes with a Tory chancellor he calls “immoral”. But to opponents within his own party, the message is relentless conciliation. A manifesto he wrote three years ago called for a tax raid on the wealthiest 10%, banning companies from paying their chief executives any more than 20 times the lowest wage, and a new top rate of tax set at 60%. But he says he is not going to dogmatically impose his ideas. What he will instead announce is policy commissions to investigate various areas and he hopes for participation from a wide range of opinion not just confined to the Labour party.

He wants to change the Bank of England’s target so that it considers not just inflation when setting interest rates, but also the effect on jobs, investment and inequality. One of his biggest and most hotly contested ideas is forcing the bank to print money to fund infrastructure projects: so-called “people’s quantitative easing”. The governor of the bank, Mark Carney, has suggested that this would so compromise its independence that he could not remain as its governor. Rather than upbraid Carney for straying into political partisanship, McDonnell mildly responds that he is “going to try to meet him as soon as possible”.

For the first time in many decades, Labour has a shadow chancellor committed to the nationalisation of some strategic industries. Polls suggest that taking the railways back into state control is popular with a majority. He is likely also to strike a chord when he describes the recent sales of shares in chunks of the Royal Mail and Royal Bank of Scotland as “complete rip-offs” that have left the taxpayer seriously short-changed.

What is perhaps most interesting in terms of his personal ideological development and the way in which debate has shifted over the decades is that he no longer advocates, as the left did back in the 1980s, a return to nationalisation across the board. BT was once a state company. Would he seek to bring it back into public ownership again? “Too late,” he says. “Love to but too late.”

Lack of voter faith in Labour’s economic competence lay at the heart of the party’s defeat back in May as it also did when they were thrown out of office in 2010. If the public did not trust Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling with the economy, nor Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, why are they going to trust Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell?

“They’re not going to have to trust me or Jeremy Corbyn or whatever. They’re going to have to trust the Labour party.”

He says he wants the membership, which grew during the leadership contest and has drawn in more Corbyn enthusiasts since the result, to get involved in policy making. This also hints at how he and Corbyn think they can mobilise support in the party as a counterweight to the hostility of the great majority of Labour MPs.

“We’ll go on the stump immediately after the party conference, get as many members out there as possible, in the same way that Jeremy went on the stump before. But the difference now will be not urging people to vote for us, it’ll be about urging people to get involved in the discussion. I think Labour MPs will be shocked at the way in which they will be engaged in a democratic process of determining our policies.”

His admirers say McDonnell is a serious thinker about a radically different way of approaching the economy. Asked which writers have most influenced him, he rattles off several names of contemporary, leftwing economists, but at the top of his list he places Karl Marx. ‘You can’t understand the capitalist system without reading Das Kapital. Full stop.’

He says this with a knowing twinkle. That is not an answer you would have got from any previous Labour shadow chancellor in living memory. Nor from any central banker.

The Law of Unintended Consequences - How well-intentioned laws, courts cripple growth in India

S A Aiyar in Times of India

A key reason why India’s economic growth has halved from 9% to 4.5% per year is that, in search of inclusive growth, the courts and legislatures have increasingly made legitimate business difficult. It now takes 12 years to open a new coal mine. This is not inclusive growth but paralysis and stagnation. 

The new land acquisition law aims at quick, fair acquisition . But the secretary of the department of industrial policy and production says the Act has made it “virtually impossible” to acquire land for roads, ports or other infrastructure. Higher compensation provided in the new law is welcome, but it also mandates a social impact assessment for each project, followed by expert group clearance, followed by an 80% vote of affected persons. Legal challenges are possible at each stage. Instead of quick, fair acquisition, we have dither and delay. 

India has become a major global player in clinical trials for new drugs. But complaints have arisen against malpractices by some companies — not informing patients of the risks, not giving insurance cover or compensation, negligence leading to deaths. The obvious answer is to prosecute and jail the guilty, deterring further misdeeds. 

But in India the courts take forever to conclude cases, so misdeeds are not deterred. Instead of focusing on quick justice, the Supreme Court has decreed lengthy new procedures for clinical trials, causing huge delays and costs for legitimate activity. 

The Serum Institute of India, a top global vaccines producer , has suffered delays of over a year in clearance for Phase 3 trials of a rotavirus vaccine. So, it is shifting clinical trials to other Asian countries for this, and for a dengue vaccine too. 

Lupin Pharmaceuticals, a top drug company, has a research park in Pune. But delays in clearances have forced it to shift clinical trials to Europe and Japan, despite much higher costs there. If Lupin’s procedures are good enough for Europe and Japan, they should be good enough for India. But our courts are under the illusion that good practices are created by a jungle of rules. Sorry, they are actually created by swift punishment that deters the guilty. That’s why clinical trials suffer from fewer malpractices in Europe or Japan.

The Supreme Court should focus on speedy convictions, not ever more regulations. 

Despite having the world’s third biggest reserves of iron ore and coal, India has begun importing both. The courts have banned iron mining in some states, and court inquiries into corrupt coal block allocations have frozen fresh mining. Now, illegal mining surely should be stopped. But the right way is to nail the guilty, not stop all legitimate activity. No illegal miners have been convicted beyond appeals, but many legitimate miners have suffered huge losses. 

Illegal sand mining is rampant. Sand is essential for making concrete for construction. But the courts have passed increasingly stringent rules, curbing mining from river beds on environmental grounds. This has created a huge shortage of sand, which in some states sells at Rs 1,800/tonne, more than the price of coal some years ago. Cowed by court strictures and threats of prosecution, many Collectors are playing safe by simply not issuing new sand licences or renewing old ones that expire. Faced with public outrage over illegal mining, the Green Tribunal has mandated environmental clearance (and hence delays) for even the smallest patches of sand. Will this check illegal activity? No, but it will reduce legal mining, making India even more dependent on the sand mafia for supplies. 

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Our courts are not designed for making policy: they are designed to judge whether actions are in accordance with the law. They are not experts in the essentially political function of balancing the needs of production and social protection.

Politicians are accountable to voters for bad policies, like those on land acquisition. But the courts are accountable to nobody for causing administrative paralysis, bankrupting honest companies , or increasing poverty by checking economic growth. 

That’s why court activism should be limited to extreme cases where governments are so corrupt that intervention is essential. There’s an old judicial saying that it’s better to let many crooks go free than jail an innocent man. Yet much judicial activism penalizes innocent entrepreneurs and bureaucrats. 

Misgovernance in India is not just the result of crooked politicians and businessmen. It is also the result of wellintentioned but badly designed laws. Above all, it is the result of a dysfunctional police-judicial system. Unending legal delays encourage law-breakers in every walk of life. The solution is not policy takeover by the courts, but quick justice.

Banker with African experience: 'Send everyone into real banking first'

A man who worked in major British banks across Africa says banks have lost touch with simple financial transactions
 

• Joris Luyendijk
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 31 January 2013 14.59 GMT

He wrote in to the banking blog saying "You haven't had anything about investment banking in Africa. Have I missed something?" We are meeting in a Starbucks off Bank, in the heart of the "square mile". He was born in east Africa, of Indian descent and worked for many years for major British banks, first across the African continent, later in London. He left some years ago for America.

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"I am good at maths and had the intellectual capacity to trade CDOs and other complex financial instruments. But it's just not real banking.

"I grew up in Kenya and in those days the British banks were sources of stability and pride. Indeed, they were the real safety net. My mother worked at a British bank. She never paid a medical bill in her life. The bank took care of that. In many African countries it was the biggest single employer, the biggest single taxpayer … The bank was funding people to go to university … Back in those days banking was a very staid, very respectable profession.

"I went to work for one of the British banks and it was great. I would work in all of the areas of proper commercial banking, each time in a different country. So I'd spend three months in Ghana, in Kenya, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe. And learn about asset finance (help companies buy equipment), trade finance (help companies trade), balance sheet advisory, structural financing … This would be alternated by six months stints in London to learn risk and treasury management.

"As I said, I have a quantitative background and later on I worked in commodity trading, in London. I was analysing a £2bn book on a daily basis. I'd risk analyse all the trades, which was a truly privileged position as I could see everything that went into a decision to trade or not, as well as get to see the process from trade through settlement to collateral management.

"Working on a trading floor in London was an interesting and different experience. On a trading floor you'd have the back-office doing the paperwork, the middle-office looking at risk and compliance, traders in front office. In Africa the back- and middle-office could be in one person before skill levels built up enough for separating the functions.

"More importantly, the distance between your work and its consequences on the ground was very short in Africa. But in London the actual economy was so far removed from your work it might as well not exist. Traders would come into work, turn on the computer and on their screen they find money, right there. That creates such a different mentality from what I had been doing in Africa. That was very surprising for me to see, that you could be a trader without ever having seen what banking actually is. To this day I can go to Lagos and say: I built that shopping mall. And that bridge. What actual, concrete achievement can a trader point to? I hear someone complained there was no social function to trading recently?

"Why am I different from those who went onto the trading floor? I suppose it's personality and values. In the late 90s in Africa, I saw whole families, solid middle-class people, get wiped out by a combination of bad government and IMF policies and a corrupt financial sector. That really drove home to me just how important stable financial institutions are. Over-indebted countries, an insolvent banking sector, rising unemployment as social spending falls… may seem new to southern Europe but some of us watched this movie before.

"After a few years on that commodity trading desk, I was hired by a major European bank to set up an Africa desk. I thought, great. Some time after that, they closed the desk because they had decided to concentrate on the American sub-prime market. In essence, they went from real banking to moving around and speculating with pieces of paper.

"This showed how people at the top of banks have huge influence. They govern how capital is allocated. Given all the new regulation like Basel III and the Dodd-Frank act… All that happens with new, ever more complex rules is that people get very good at getting round them. More and more, success in investment banking amounts to being able to game the rules and get capital. Trading floor politicians, I call them.

"There was a time that you could be a very successful manager at a major company, say, Boots, and after managing and growing that business for a decade, you'd become a bank chairman. That is no longer the case. Now bankers are recruited straight out of elite universities, they've never seen how you actually run a business. All the way to the top it's an insulated community.

"Still, the financial industry can turn around very fast. You change the hiring and recruiting. Send everyone into real banking first, before they can go into investment banking. So everyone starts in retail, where you actually see that old lady stumble in with her savings to make a deposit, see that local businessman struggling to run his company and pay wages. You make a number of real loans to businesses, proper commercial lending. Next you spend two years in restructuring, cleaning up after a bad loan – and you learn what happens when your bank lends money to the wrong party.

"I recollect one bank, Standard Chartered used to do this. You could not go into corporate or investment banking before working in retail commercial banking.
"The industry also needs to change the rules. Banking must become very simple again, where everyone should be able to determine the health of an institution.
"I seem to recall reading that Barclays paid more in bonuses than in taxes or dividends one year? First time in my life that I wondered about what our industry had become? I thought of Zambia, Kenya, Nigeria… All these places were Barclays and Standard Chartered were the single biggest tax payer, single biggest employer. Tells you why the industry is pivoting away from the city.
"You're asking about finance and development? Well, there are difficult choices. Tobacco, agribusiness, mining used to build more schools, clinics and houses in Africa than any amount of aid. Do we want to see corporations increase their footprint? That's a typical trade-off. Major companies are often the only real safety net for their employees and families. But, say, with tobacco, is it acceptable … Canada is having this debate now.
"Anyway, by now they've probably stopped caring for employees anyway, forced by their shareholders to concentrate exclusively on their quarterly earnings. This has been happening across the board. When companies' decisions should factor in the next 25 years, these days it's more the next 25 weeks!
"It's rarely easy in Africa. Sure, you can demand that this western bank or that stop funding, say, mining. Let me tell you, there is a lot of shady money clamouring to replace us. Drug money, money from piracy, from trading blood diamonds and other illicit resource sales, money looted by corrupt officials … The mining company prefers to deal with a western bank, as they have high professional operating standards and support. If western banks withdraw, for example because we don't want to do any business in Zimbabwe any longer, then it's the other money moving in. That shady money will have no standards regarding corruption, pollution and workers' rights. Banks can spot and be a part of stopping corruption.
"In my experience battling corruption in Africa often comes down to a gut feeling. You're taking a company public, in a so-called IPO. Among the shareholders there's this one mysterious party holding 5%. Do you demand that party release all the names behind it, not just the shell companies but the actual owners? In return for access to western investors, our banks could if they wanted to.
"Africa desperately needs so-called 'deeper capital markets'. If more local people make local deposits, and they invest those in their own country, there are none of the currency or inflation risks you have with foreign investors. But since there are so few solid local places for the African middle class to invest in, most of it goes into real estate which then becomes massively overheated.
"Securitisation, currency and interest swaps ... These instruments, if applied correctly, could do a massive good in Africa. Africa desperately needs 10, 20, 30 years' money, ie long-term investments. To build roads, railroads, bridges, airports, irrigation projects.
"The City could do this. Go back to real banking."