| Hello and welcome to Working It, the FT’s weekly guide to the workplace and leadership. Our latest film is out now, on FT.com and YouTube: ‘The Infinite Career: Why we can’t retire’ 🍿. Many people need to work into their sixties and seventies, in order to finance longer lives, but, as the film shows, that’s happening at the same time as a collapse in corporate opportunities for those in mid-life and beyond. In the words of one interviewee, successful career “pivoter” Nicole Vanderbilt, CEO of Bookshop.org UK, “it’s incredibly difficult to get a new job at an older age”. Read on for some fascinating future-of-work predictions from the economic historian and workplace tech writer, Dror Poleg. While we wait for those to happen 🔮, the near future (next week) brings us FT Live’s Future of AI Summit — there’s still time to register. I’ll be chairing a session with FT colleagues John Burn-Murdoch and Sarah O’Connor, authors of the AI Shift newsletter. Do come and say hello 👋. *Slightly shorter newsletter today as I’ve been unwell. Normal service resumes next week 🤞🏼. More risk, more reward: the future shape of work? | | | | 
Take a leap: we need to be comfortable with risk-taking © FT montage/Dreamstime A lot of future-of-work talk focuses on stats about AI job displacement. Dror Poleg, an economic historian who looks at the impact of technology on work, believes the jobs may well remain, but the tech transformation will change “the distribution of income, the stability of the job, the status of the job”. Many of us only think about “will AI take my job or not — and if it won’t, I don’t need to worry about it”; that leaves us at risk of failing to plan for other scenarios. Dror believes that people in white-collar and professional work will need to take more risk in future, alongside an accompanying higher tolerance for failure 😨. I was interested in his view that our anchor point for what is “normal” is 20th-century postwar America. This period was shortlived and “held together by a set of events that will never occur again”. Those of us outside the US only experienced it via US television shows 📺. Once we let go of that outdated idea of “normal”, we can perhaps think differently about how organisations can re-engineer themselves for the future. Dror suggests that “we have to design systems that assume a higher rate of failure”. Change is likely to be a constant: “the environment is so adaptive, [every business solution is] not going to work for very long. It’s going be copied really quickly, or lose its potency very quickly.” This kind of thinking is not easy for anyone who’s spent a professional career inside traditional, slow-moving firms. Successful organisations, Dror thinks, will become “more network-like”. In this set-up, leadership will be less about telling people what to do, and more about allowing “a process of emergence” and innovation. It’s no surprise that companies run by entrepreneurs are thriving in the current environment: “You need people who are trying completely absurd things, and who work in very unusual ways.” In Dror’s telling, the link between our efforts and their likely reward is going to be broken💰. “In a lot of white-collar work, we assume that if everyone tries harder, or we’ll change some policy, then we’ll go back to the 1950s and everything will be wonderful and everyone will have a stable job.” He thinks we haven’t yet “internalised” this change. (Speaking for myself, I think he’s right 🫣.) When AI can do everything, we humans will need to shift our tactics. This is how Dror sums it up: “Essentially, the only way to succeed is to take more risk; by trying to aim for the middle, to do the reasonable things, [it’s] not just that it’s not going to lead to an outsized outcome anymore. It’s probably going lead to guaranteed failure.” After talking to Dror, it struck me that a version of the political polarisation currently happening in many countries may well come to workplaces: the comfortable middle ground, along with its familiar structures and skills, could easily disappear. We may all end up working at the extremes. Keen to hear your thoughts on work lives made up of constant experimentation (or not): isabel.berwick@ft.com This week’s tip comes courtesy of Caroline Webb, a leadership coach and the author of Leadership Intelligence. She shares how she uses AI — and also how she advises her clients to talk about AI use with their staff: “I talk about a rule I call ‘first mile, last mile. That means I do my own thinking first, so I’m not anchored by whatever the AI generates. Then I use AI to deepen my thinking. Finally, I always do the last mile myself: reviewing the output with a critical eye, exercising judgment and often editing heavily before I send the work to anyone else. I’m also transparent about the four ways I use AI in the middle: to kick the tyres on my reasoning (“Where are the holes?”); take another person’s perspective (“How would they see this?”); expand beyond my first ideas (“What could be another approach?”); and organise or synthesise information (“What are the main themes?”). “Your rules of engagement may be different but the key is to be explicit with colleagues about your approach, so you’re on the same page about how to use AI to amplify your collective intelligence.” Five top stories from the world of work | | | | What my most embarrassing job interview taught me: Pilita Clark shares memories of a cringeworthy moment when she was a young editor in London. She uses it to explore the topic of salaries in job ads and pay transparency. Lots of reader comments as well. Politicians should ‘look at the UK economy as a CEO would’, says Lloyds Bank’s boss: The nagging frustration the boss of Lloyds Banking Group Charlie Nunn feels towards UK regulators pervades this interview with Patrick Jenkins. Elite consulting firms raise starting salaries for first time since 2022: McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and Bain have all increased pay for new recruits in the US as competition intensifies for graduates from technology and AI companies. Law firm Weil prepares for possible wind-down as crisis deepens: The dramatic downturn in the fortunes at one of the largest and most prestigious law firms in the US has unsettled the whole industry. Anthropic’s seven founders tighten grip ahead of blockbuster IPO: The complicated governance structure at the Claude maker means the founders make all the decisions and ordinary shareholders will have virtually no control.
I am under the weather with a bad cold and am also a novice cook. Neither is a promising state, but both have been improved with Lozhka, a new cookbook of “Eastern European Soups, Stews and Other Things We Eat with a Spoon” 🥄, by Alissa Timoshkina. I’m working my way through the winter soups in the book, and they are a. foolproof and b. delicious. Highly recommended. | 
