Thinkers50 Hall of Fame: Lynda Gratton

Transcript

Stuart Crainer:

Hello, I am Stuart Crainer, co-founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame for 2024, which we present in partnership with the hire group. The Hall of Fame comes out every year. It is an opportunity to celebrate the foundational thinkers of modern management. Inductees into the Hall of Fame in recent years have included Don Tapscott, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Margaret Heffernan, Clay Christensen, and a host of other inspirational figures from modern management thinking. Today I’m delighted to be talking with an inductee into the 2024 Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, Lynda Gratton. Lynda is someone whose work we have celebrated in the Thinkers50 ranking for many years. She’s a professor at London Business School and the author of a series of bestselling books. Lynda, welcome and congratulations.

Lynda Gratton:

Thank you, Stuart.

Stuart Crainer:

Thinking about your work and your career, is there a golden thread when you look back to make sense?

Lynda Gratton:

I think there is, and I think the golden thread, Stuart, is that I’m fascinated with work and I was wondering, well, where does it all start? And for me, it started even watching my dad work in a factory and thinking, whoa, that’s interesting. And then working in a factory myself during my PhD and watching Death of a Salesman. Do you remember that amazing play about what it is to work? And so that’s been for me, something that’s gone right the way through my whole life. My PhD was on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in a work situation. All my jobs have been focused on work. So if there was a golden thread, I think it’s an absolute fascination in why we work, where we work, when we work, how we work.

Stuart Crainer:

There’s a lot to unpack in that first answer, Lynda. So there’s not many people who get Arthur Miller in so early as well, Death of a Salesman. You’re right. A fantastic piece of work. So tell us about the factory where your father worked, where was that?

Lynda Gratton:

Oh, well he worked in the north of England. He worked in a factory, he was a factory manager. And that really gave me my first sense. But then I worked in a factory, of course Terry’s Chocolate factory in York on a conveyor belt. And honestly, Stuart, if anyone needs to understand work, just work on a conveyor belt for a couple of months. That’s enough to give anybody a sense of what work is. But of course I’ve had a very fortunate life in many ways because I didn’t stay on that conveyor belt and I didn’t go into the call centre that many of the women who were, I took a PhD, I worked at British Airways, I went to PA Consulting group. And so I really experienced what it was to work, but as a different type of work. But I stayed very excited and interested in the idea of work.

And I think the Death of a Salesman, coming back to that, do you remember that marvellous line? They eat the orange and throw away the peel? I bet you remember that Stuart. So what I was always interested in was how do we make work and life work? And I guess as a woman growing up in the 1960s, in the 1970s, that was a really big question, how do we make it work? I remember I was at PA Consulting Group in my mid-thirties, really ready to take on a big job. I was the youngest partner. I had a great big BMW 7  Series, I don’t know if you remember those, lots of big salary.

And I looked around and thought, gosh, there’s nobody here with any children, any women with any kids. How do I do this? How do I make this work? And part of the reason I joined academia, not by any means the only reason, is just it was a more flexible way of living. And so I’ve always been really fascinated in how me and my students and my kids and the people I advise, how do they make it all work? How do you make work work? And that’s a topic even now I’m writing about in my latest book, which we’ll hear more about later.

Stuart Crainer:

So what about the leap to do a PhD? What made you do the PhD in the first place? You’re on the factory line making chocolate and-

Lynda Gratton:

Yeah.

Stuart Crainer:

… PhD, what was the impetus behind it?

Lynda Gratton:

Well, I was making the chocolates to pay for the PhD, so it was a student job. I just actually went straight from my first degree straight into a PhD, which was odd in a way because quite a lot of people, especially when they’re interested in work, go off and do some work and then do their PhD. I didn’t, I just went straight through. The advantage of that, it meant that I had my PhD when I was in my late twenties, and that meant I could then do other things. I am just really fascinated. What I began to learn is that I love writing and I still do. The book I’m writing at the moment has got this concept of mastery in it. How do you master something? And I began to master how to write. I did it in my first degree, I did it again in my PhD. I carried on writing. I still write. I’m just writing my column for The Times just today, just before I’m speaking to you. And I love writing and then I also love teaching.

So that combination of things just became an enormous energy for my life and a source of mastery.

Stuart Crainer:

So who were your mentors early on? You were consulting your PhD, before you got to London Business School, who were your key mentors?

Lynda Gratton:

Well, I struggled with that question, I struggled with it myself because I’m writing about my own memories of work. I didn’t really feel particularly mentored actually. And I’ve talked to other women about that. And I think part of the challenge that we had growing up is that there weren’t many women around, all of the senior people were men. I think there was a slightly weird dynamic around that. So I didn’t have mentors as such, but I had lots of people that I loved, most of whom were writers. So I read an enormous amount, I still do. If you look, you could only see part of my room here, but if you looked at other parts you’d see that it was full of books as well.

So I always… Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, they were my mentors as much as anybody else really. I wanted, I guess, to be mentored by women, but there weren’t any women. I was one of the first women at PA Consulting Group. There were more women at British Airways, my second big job. And then at London Business School, I was one of the first women who became a professor. So I think if you talk to women of my age, quite a lot of them will say the same, that we weren’t really a group who were mentored or sponsored. People didn’t quite know what to do with us.

Stuart Crainer:

So talk us through what was the attraction of academia? Because as you said you were a successful, well-paid PA consultant, BA as well. What was the attraction of academia? Because you are fascinated by work and the practice of work rather than the obscurity of academic research.

Lynda Gratton:

Well, interestingly, and again in the book that I’m writing at the moment, Stuart, I’ve been looking at that and it’s what Herminia Ibarra calls the side project. So whilst I was at British Airways, I did a side project. So we were looking at… it’s deadly boring, but we were looking at assessment centres. And we had this enormous amount of data about assessment centres and how they work. And I kept that data and I worked with a colleague who I’d met who was at Manchester University, and he and I wrote that up, and we wrote three articles, three research articles, very research-based. And that meant, and there was no reason for me to do that, it wasn’t part of my job, I didn’t get any kudos from it. It wasn’t part of my performance metrics, but I just decided to do it. And looking back, I actually can’t quite understand why I did it. But anyway, I did.

And what that meant, Stuart, is that years later when I wanted to go back to academia, and in this case I wanted to go to London Business School, I actually could get in because when they said, how many journal articles do you have? I had three. It was an astonishing thing really. And one of them is highly cited. And so I was bridging, always bridging between academia and practitioners. And what’s been very fortunate for me at London Business School, is that London Business School has, as you know, a job called Professor of Management Practice. And there’s very few of us, in fact, there’s currently only two, and we are celebrated for our capacity to bridge between the amazing work that my colleagues do, which is very deep research and the problems that managers face right now. And I’m eternally grateful to London Business School for having that job title and for treating me with some respect actually, even though I’m not a deep academic as some of my colleagues are.

And I think actually Thinkers50 has always understood that, haven’t you? When you think about the people that you’ve had in the top 10 or top 20 thinkers, I can see that you’ve also always felt the same. It is in that combination of bringing together academia and management practice that is a real sweet spot. And it’s been your sweet spot at Thinkers50 over the years. I’ve been on the Ranking for so many years and I can feel that that’s what you would celebrate, and that’s what I celebrate as well. And you can see it in the World Economic Forum. I’ve been a member of the World Economic Forum for more than a decade. And again, if you go to Davos, that’s what the thing is, people are interested in research, but they’re also interested in what does it mean for practice? And that’s always been my question, what does it mean for people like my dad, people like me when I was young, people like my own kids?

Stuart Crainer:

And when you joined London Business School, as you said, it was a very different world in business schools at that time, wasn’t it? There weren’t many women, but when you joined, there was a good cadre of people.

Lynda Gratton:

Oh, there were. Well, you know some of them, I don’t know if you remember John Hunt, but it was John Hunt who actually, who brought me in and he’s passed away now, but he was an amazing person. And then, of course, there was the wonderful Gareth Jones and Rob Goffey. Gareth, of course, has also passed away, but Rob, I’m having lunch with Rob next week actually. Rob was and remains a wonderful person. And I think another piece that we might want to think about in terms of the intellectual journey is the role of the different disciplines. And when I think about the people that I’m reading the most and enjoy the most, they tend to be sociologists, people like Anthony Giddens, people like Richard Sennett, and of course Rob and Gareth were both sociologists.

And even though I was brought up as a psychologist, my PhD is in psychology, I’ve always felt that sociology has got this amazing capacity to move from the individual to the group, to the team, to the organisation. Of course, that’s what Rob did. I think I’ve got his book right behind me, and that’s what Gareth did. And I was very fortunate to be part of that. We had so much fun. I’m writing my memories at the moment and at least I’ve got a whole bunch of memories of Gareth and Rob, mostly obviously drinking beer, because that’s what they did a lot of the time. But just being in pubs and talking and yes, you’ve got to have a lot of fun with work.

And actually the book I’m writing at the moment really says that. You’ve got to find work that you enjoy, you’ve got to have fun, you’ve got to build your energy, got to have stories to tell. Otherwise, why would you carry on working into your seventies? Which Stuart, you are going to have to do, I’m already doing it, but everyone who’s listening needs to be thinking about that. The 100-Year Life here… it is somewhere behind me.

Stuart Crainer:

Well, let’s talk about your books then, because there’s a huge difference, but you would expect that in your career, from Living Strategy to your work on The 100-Year Life. How do you make sense of the development from the Living Strategy to The Democratic Enterprise, which I remember reading, Hot Spots, Glow? How do you make sense of it?

Lynda Gratton:

Yeah, well here they are actually, in fact, I didn’t mean to put them behind me, but this is the very earliest one. Here it is, Living Strategy. In fact, my husband was talking about it yesterday because he said, you look as if you’re about 12 years old. I do look as if I’m about 12. This is a sweet book. It’s an old book for goodness sake. And look, it’s absolutely lovely. Well, the thing is, I love writing and if you love writing then you have to write books. And so I’ve written absolutely loads of books, probably more than I should have done. And what I’ve tried to do is just to capture issues. So Living Strategy was really just a book about how you think about human resource strategy. I was running a program at London Business called Still Am. I’ve run that program, Stuart. More than 50 times. Can you believe it, honestly?

Still full. Still got a waiting list. But that was the question that I addressed there. How do you think about human resource strategy? And then The Democratic Enterprise, you said to me earlier you thought was one of the best written books. It certainly might’ve been well written, but it certainly wasn’t read. But I wanted there to explore the notion of democracy, the shift, this one here, I like a lot. I know everyone shouldn’t love one’s books. You mustn’t single them out. They’re like your kids, you’ve got to love them each, all as much as each other. But I do really love this. And actually this book I’m writing at the moment, I went back, in fact, I’ve been back to it twice because this is called The Future of Work is Already Here. And in it, I actually go back and it’s written in 2011, there it is, 2011. And I try and pretend it’s 2025.

So I wrote one of my MIT columns about that and saying, what did I get? What did I get wrong? And that’s really fascinating. And then I just started diving into things. So I dove into the whole question about cooperation, which was the Hot Spots. Obviously demography was a huge issue. I did a couple of books on that. And then I did redesigning work, which was the whole hybrid thing. And what I’ve tried to do, Stuart, and I don’t know if my readers realise this, maybe you do, is that when I’m interested in a topic, I tend to write a book for managers and a book for individuals. So the best example of that in cooperation would be Hot Spots, which is about how do you build a cooperative organisation? And Glow, which is not a book I love by the way, but nevertheless, one must love them equally, Glow is a book about how you personally learn to be cooperative.

And The 100-Year Life was more about what it means as a person to live a 100 years, The New Long Life, the book that followed it, was more about how you think about it from a corporate, from a government perspective. And the book I’m writing now is again, a book for individuals and with a working title, which won’t be the final title, How to Build, How to Make a Good Working Life, but it probably won’t be that by the time it comes out. But that’s the book I’m finishing actually at the moment.

Stuart Crainer:

Hot Spots appeared to me to be a critical book for you because you created the Hot Spots movement.

Lynda Gratton:

Oh yes, that’s right.

Stuart Crainer:

So you took the ideas, the organisational ideas, and then really connected with organisations and created a lot of momentum around it, I thought.

Lynda Gratton:

Yes. No, that’s a really good point. Thank you for thinking about that. Well, I wrote the Hot Spots and then, well, I’d been working on Consortium for years, so even this one here, Living Strategy, I had to read them myself actually recently to get a sense of where I was coming from. But Living Strategy has got a consortium in it. It’s not called The Future of Work Consortium. I gave it some other name. So that was a long time ago. So a long time ago, I was building a consortium of companies to talk about issues. I built one called The Future of Work Consortium. Now in its 15th year, can you imagine? That consortium has been going for 15 years. We just can’t seem to be able to finish it. Each time you think, oh, there’s nothing more to say about the future of work. A pandemic comes along, generative AI comes along and you have to think, oh my goodness, you have to keep on talking about it.

And so I started my own consulting practice, HSM. Well, it was the Hot Spots Movement. Obviously by some stage a brand expert came along and said, Lynda, you can’t have a company called Hot Spots Movement. So we changed it to HSM and it’s run by an amazing group of people. We’ve got a fabulous office in Covent Garden, and I’m really proud of the people, I’m proud of the people in it now, I’m proud of the ones who went through it and did other great things. And so it’s been a real opportunity for people who are interested in the future of work to come together, to work as consultants, to advise organisations, to build some amazing tools. And it’s still going. It’s still very much part of my life.

Stuart Crainer:

Let’s go back a minute to, you said you wrote a column about what you got right in 2011 when you were predicting 2025 and what you got wrong.

Lynda Gratton:

Yeah.

Stuart Crainer:

What did you get right and what did you get wrong?

Lynda Gratton:

Well, the awful thing is, and honestly, Stuart, this is, I don’t know what we say about this in terms of the world, I had to slightly fudge it a bit. But what I did is, I thought about the bright side of the future and the dark side of the future. And what I got right was all the dark side. So a dark side fragmentation, a three-minute world, isolation, the genesis of loneliness. You could write this now, couldn’t you? Exclusion, the new poor, oh my goodness, I was completely spot on. That was so obvious. The things I didn’t get so right were the bright side of the future, which is co-creation, energy, social engagement, the rise of empathy and balance and micro entrepreneurship, crafting creative lives. I did get that right.

Micro entrepreneurship, I didn’t quite get it right, what it would look like, because what I’ve written about recently, you perhaps saw in my last Harvard Business Review article with Dan Gerson, was freelancers. And that’s an amazingly important story, the way that freelancers are really bringing a whole new way of work to organisations. So that’s it really. And one of the things that people say about me sometimes negatively because it drives them mad, is my constant optimism. And so I still remain incredibly optimistic, even though the shift was very good at describing what was going to go wrong.

Stuart Crainer:

Well, I suppose the 100-Year Life is an exercise in optimism as well, isn’t it?

Lynda Gratton:

It is, it is an exercise. And in fact, I’m an exercise in optimism as well because now it’s very nice that I got this award. My birthday’s coming up, my 70th birthday is coming up soon. So I consider it part of my gifts. Thank you Stuart for that gift. I’ve got a few others in mind, but that’s one of them. That’s an unexpected gift. So yeah, we need to keep on working and I’m doing it myself. I’m encouraging others. The book I’m writing is an encouragement about how you build a long working life.

Stuart Crainer:

The 100-Year Life, it seemed, not a diversion, but a change of direction. And it worked out really well for you because you’re now big in Japan amongst everything.

Lynda Gratton:

Well, it was astonishing. The thing about The 100-Year Life is it started with a question, and the question was, so when we look to the future of work, one thing that came out is that we’re going to live longer. The basic economics, which everybody’s now discovering, is if you live longer, you have to work longer. You either have to save more or you have to work longer. And lots of people haven’t saved, so they have to work. And I was fortunate enough, obviously, to link up with Andrew Scott, who is an economist and an incredibly smart guy. And we spent about a year just talking to each other about, well, what happens when everyone lives to a 100? And we wrote the book and then we went on to write a second book about that. And it became a really important book for me and for him. It sold more than a million copies, which is very unusual for any business book to do.

It sold a lot in Japan, a lot in China. It went into more than 20 languages. I was then invited to sit on Prime Minister Abe’s Council in Japan. I spent a lot of time in Japan. It got translated into all of these different Japanese, and then it became a manga. I don’t know if I have a copy to show you, probably not. But it became a manga with Andrew and I as manga characters. And now, and Stuart, I don’t think I’ve told you this, it’s now been made into a textbook for 14-year-olds, and it’s been rolled out across many, many schools in Japan. So when I look back on my life as I am doing, I feel so happy about that, so happy that I was able to bring a positive, uplifting story about, look, we can work longer, but we have to work differently. And that’s really the new book I’m writing, How to Make a Good Working Life is about that. And it comes back to many of the themes that you and I have been talking about for decades.

Stuart Crainer:

There’s a sense that the momentum in your work and output has actually increased in recent years since The 100-Year Life, you really seem to have moved up again. Do you have a sense of that or-

Lynda Gratton:

I don’t really. What happened is that I didn’t, and this is very interesting about being a mum actually. This was my first big book and I didn’t write that until my children were at an age where I didn’t have to look after them all the time. And then I became very productive. In fact, if you look at what I produced, I think you’ve just noticed me more. Because in that marvellous theory about people’s lives, the notion that you explore and then you exploit, I’m in the exploitation, but I’ve done a lot of exploring. This book here, honestly, when I read this, it’s a really good book. And I look at it and I think, wow, there’s a lot of work in here. So this was huge. It was a pretty important book. And this did really well in Japan. This became the shift, and then The 100-Year Life became Life Shift. They didn’t call it The 100-Year Life. And then we had Work Shift. So it was completely… All of the books were given different names in Japan because they love the word shift so much.

Stuart Crainer:

Well, I suppose they’re used to the 100-Year Life concept, aren’t they in Japan?

Lynda Gratton:

Yeah. Yes, they are. They are. But I do feel I’m in a stage now where it’s much easier for me to do stuff. I’ve just started writing my Times article, and it won’t take me very long to write it. But like you, because I’m now very practised in writing, I’m very practised in speaking. So one can just do it more easily.

Stuart Crainer:

Talk to us about Redesigning Work as well, which subtitles, How to Transform Your Organisation and Make Hybrid Work for Everyone.

Lynda Gratton:

Yeah. Well, this came right out of, can I do another show and tell? I just happened to have it here. Honestly, I didn’t. It came around that. My husband did this for me. He said, Lynda, why don’t you just make something of this, make it into us. So I’ve got it, but I never actually hung it on the wall. But that was the front cover of Harvard Business Review in May 2021. And it was called How to Manage the New Reality of Work Doing Hybrid Right. It was a front cover, it was a really big article. And so Penguin came to me and said, could you write a book about redesigning work? And I went, and I said, yeah, no, no, really, it’s going to be great. And so I did, and it ruined at least a year of my life writing it. And it was about how do you redesign work?

And I got so much information because HSM were right in the thick of it. So we were advising so many companies on hybrid that… And I was running these webinars and teaching at London Business School and advising a whole bunch of companies, and I was at Davos. So I just knew so much about it. And as you know, I’ve got this thing where I keep a diary. Here they are, there they are. Those are all my diaries. So I had kept a really close diary during the pandemic, so I knew what the issues were. And so I just wrote them all down and it became an important book because… But on the other hand, hybrid still, even just today, I was talking to somebody about it. I cannot believe that we’re still talking about hybrid two years later, but we are. So the book was really about how do you redesign work?

And if you’re interested in hybrid work, it is the book on how you make hybrid work. And it does it from a design perspective. One of the things that I noticed actually, Stuart, when I went through my life, is how much I’ve enjoyed systems thinking right from the very beginning. And I know that some of your Hall of Fame people are people who think in systems. And I think that with Redesigning Work, I just did that again. I said, let’s take a systems perspective, let’s think about it as a design issue and think about what do we want, where are we now? How do we get there? So that circle, which I’d used so many times, just became an easy way of thinking about redesigning work. And the book that I’m writing at the moment is another continuation of that. But this from an individual perspective, how do you redesign your work as opposed to how do you work in a company that redesigns? But it’s a great book for managers and people have really found it useful.

Stuart Crainer:

I know you are positive and optimistic, but do you think we’ve really made a significant stride? We’ve made strides since you worked in a factory, but it seems very slow at times, doesn’t it? Organisations have been very slow to convince about the merits of hybrid working or flexible working. When you think of Steve Shirley and her work in the-

Lynda Gratton:

Oh, yes.

Stuart Crainer:

… that was nearly 50 years ago and it was groundbreaking in the UK, but 50 years later we’ve caught up with what she was doing then really. It always seems really frustratingly slow to me.

Lynda Gratton:

Well, I feel it’s frustrating. I think it’s really fast, actually. I think that pandemic really was a game changer, Stuart, I really do. We forget about the fact that we spent one and a half years sitting in our rooms. Not everybody, I think at the time, I’d said, my son at that stage was working as a doctor on A&E, and he certainly wasn’t sitting in his room and 50% of workers weren’t, but lots of us were. And we realized we could be quite productive. And then we realised that actually we missed having other people. And we realised that face-to-face was amazing. So all of that is being played out. And I think I’m not really frustrated about the movement, Stuart, what I think is happening is a much deeper conversation about the nature of work, about what work is, about why we do it.

And I think that the real change also has been generative AI, which is just transforming. And there you can see two narratives, one narrative from the tech people and people selling tech like BCG and McKinsey saying it’s going to completely transform the world. And then the labour economists saying, well, actually, we don’t see that. We don’t see that in the labour figures. We don’t see it in the way people are working. And I’ve been very thoughtful, I think, about generative AI, both realising what it will mean, but also realising that it could be positive for us just as every technology always has been, but it will change the way that we work. And if I look at my own father’s work and my work, of course, the thing that’s the most different now and then is that we are connected all the time and he wasn’t.

He came home from work and he was disconnected from work and there was nothing to reconnect him. Even when I was in PA consulting, when I walked home from PA, it was a big job, but when I walked home, that was it. That was the end of my day. And that just isn’t the case anymore. And I think that level of connection has both enormous advantages, but really has created real difficulties of bringing calm into our lives. And the book that I’m writing at the moment, have written, talks quite a bit about calm, how do you calm yourself and what are the rituals and habits of staying calm?

Stuart Crainer:

So in 30 years when we’re celebrating your 100th birthday, Lynda, what will the world of work be like, looking forward?

Lynda Gratton:

Honestly, I-

Stuart Crainer:

You’ll still be working obviously.

Lynda Gratton:

Yeah, probably. Yeah. Well, I haven’t got anything else to do, Stuart, you know me. I’ve got nothing else to amuse myself with. I would like to live, I don’t think I’ll live to a 100. I’ve said 94, but that’s what my financial planning is, it’s for 94, so I’m still going to have great holidays even when I’m 94. I think it’s very hard to predict actually, Stuart. And in fact, I’ve stopped trying to predict. MIT said to me, look, could you do that all over again? You’ve made some predictions. And I just can’t because I just think, what is it going to be like? I don’t know. I didn’t get the predictions. The technology predictions in the shift were relatively wrong. And that was because I listened too much to the technologists telling me where we would be living now. And I don’t know if you remember Stuart, but we would certainly have autonomous cars. We would certainly have avatars, we’d certainly have robots rushing up and down the road, and we don’t have any of those things.

So I’m much more pragmatic about humans’ capacity to use technology than I was when I wrote last time. So I don’t really have any predictions about the future. It is going to be more of the same. And I think what we have to do is we have to watch every single day. That’s why I keep my diaries. We just got to keep our eyes open, Stuart, to find out what on earth is going on around here. Certainly we’re living longer. The continent of Africa is really important. And that’s part of what I’m working on at the moment, particularly at London Business School, is to try and bring more people through the talent pools of Africa into the global market, which is really not happening at the rate it should be. So I think you are going to see huge government issues, huge, of course, climate change. So it’s another big book to be written. I’m not going to write it, but I know that others are.

Stuart Crainer:

You mentioned Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, Richard Sennett’s work on craft. What are you reading at the moment? Which thinkers and people influence you now?

Lynda Gratton:

Well, some of the old people actually. It’s not a whole bunch of young people. The book I have in front of me at the moment is Siri Hustvedt, who is a fiction writer. And because I’m trying to write something about memory at the moment, I’m reading a lot more fiction. I think in general, fiction writers of the very highest quality are better trained than we are to write beautifully. And so I’ve been trying to write beautifully. So I tend to read fiction right now, and that’s just, it’s tough because you read some of those sentences and then you read your own sentence and you go, whoa, Lynda, you can do better than that.

Stuart Crainer:

Well, it is difficult to write poetry if you’re writing about systems thinking, isn’t it? Or-

Lynda Gratton:

Yeah, it is.

Stuart Crainer:

… policies.

Lynda Gratton:

Yeah. Well, that’s why I’m not writing about those at the moment. I’ve stopped after Redesigning Work. I’m not currently writing anything about what companies are doing. I’m trying to address the individual with beautiful prose. You will be the judge of that Stuart when you see it.

Stuart Crainer:

But how have you got the balance in your career between the teaching, the research, the writing?

Lynda Gratton:

Yeah. Well, actually I don’t find it that difficult because, of course, I also have a lot of fun. You haven’t talked about all the adventures I have, the travels I go on. And I think the reason that it makes it work, and it was Andrew Scott that saw it even more clearly than I did, because when we talked about the 100-Year Life, one of the things we talked about was multi-stages. And as an economist, he said the problem about having multi-stages is that the cost of reinvention is very high. The cost of switching from one thing to another is very high. And actually, the interesting thing about my own life as I look back is, although I’ve played it in lots of different ways, I’ve played it as a professor, I’ve played it as a CEO of a business. I’ve played it as a corporate speaker, I’ve played it as a CEO advisor..I sit on three advisory boards at the moment of large companies. It is always about the same thing. It’s always about work. And I haven’t really gone very far from that, how long we work, why we work, what corporations do. But I think that’s what stopped me from going too fragmented, really, is that even though I play on different pictures, the thing that really excites me and interests me and still does, I still, even yesterday, just ordered yet another book from Amazon about, a new book that’s just been published on work. And I think that’s what it is. Lots of different ways of me working, but only one question, and the question is about work.

Stuart Crainer:

Lynda, thank you very much. Always a delight to talk to you. Check out Lynda’s work at Lyndagratten.com. All the books we’ve talked about could be recommended, I think. What was your favourite book again? The Shift?

Lynda Gratton:

Well, I do like The Shift. The most successful by a mile obviously was a 100-Year Life, but I think it’s worth reading The Shift. In fact, I reckon it’s one of the texts I use for my MBA class.

Stuart Crainer:

Seek it out. And Redesigning Work as well, I recommend as well.

Lynda Gratton:

Good. Good for you.

Stuart Crainer:

Well, we could encourage people to seek out The Democratic Enterprise.

Lynda Gratton:

We could. I think it’s out of print. We should really get it reprinted. I think I’ve got one of the last copies. It is not in print Stuart. We should have it reprinted.

Stuart Crainer:

And we could suggest the best of Lynda Gratton.

Lynda Gratton:

The best of Lynda-

Stuart Crainer:

What a book that would be.

Lynda Gratton:

I know. Well, yeah. Then I think I’ll have to die when I write that. So let’s leave that for another 10 years.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah. Well, we could leave that for another 30 years.

Lynda Gratton:

Yeah, let’s leave it for another 30 years. Yeah.

Stuart Crainer:

Lynda, thank you very much. Congratulations on becoming a member of the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame.

Lynda Gratton:

Thank you. Thank you, thank you, Stuart.