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Lionel Barber, Former Editor of the Financial Times, on the Secret Story of the World’s Greatest Disruptor

Strategy Skills episode 522 is an interview with the author of Gambling Man: The Secret Story of the World’s Greatest Disruptor, Masayoshi Son, Lionel Barber.

In this episode, Lionel discusses his career and insights on leadership, journalism, and business transformation. He talks about his tenure at the Financial Times and offers advice to young professionals on how to succeed in today’s ever-changing and challenging world. In this interview, Lionel also shares key lessons from his new book and his research on SoftBank CEO and financial disruptor, Masayoshi Son, highlighting the insights we can learn from him.

I hope you will enjoy this episode.

Kris Safarova

 

 

 

Lionel Barber is the former editor of the Financial Times. As editor, he interviewed many of the world’s leaders in business and politics, including US Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Russian president Vladimir Putin, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Barber has cowritten several books and has lectured widely on foreign policy, transatlantic relations, and economics. He also served on the Board of Trustees at the Tate and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He graduated in 1978 from St Edmund Hall, Oxford University, with a joint honors degree in German and modern history and speaks French and German fluently.

 

Get Lionel Barber’s new book here:

Gambling Man: The Secret Story of the World’s Greatest Disruptor, Masayoshi Son


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Episode Transcript:

Kris Safarova  00:45

Welcome to the Strategy Skills podcast. I’m your host, Kris, and our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free download, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. And you can also get McKinsey and BCG-winning resume, which is a resume that cut office from both of those firms. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf. And today we have with us an incredible guest, Lionel Barber, who is a former editor of the Financial Times. As editor, he interviewed many of the world’s leaders in business and politics, including US presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin. And he has co written several books and has lectured widely on foreign policy, Trans Atlantic, relations and economics, and he also served on the Board of Trustees at the Tate and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. And he graduated in 1978 from Oxford University with a joint honors degree in German and modern history, and speaks French and German fluently, and English, so incredible, three languages. Lionel, so great to have you with us.

 

Lionel Barber  02:01

It’s great to be here. Thank you very much for having me on the show.

 

Kris Safarova  02:05

You’ve had one of the most distinguished careers in journalism, and looking back, what do you think were the key factors that made you successful?

 

Lionel Barber  02:15

Curiosity is the most important quality, I think, for a journalist, that you’ll never think that you know everything, that you want to find out things sometimes that people don’t want you to find out. And then you tell stories and you’re interested in people. So for me, curiosity, not cynicism, is the most important quality to have.

 

Kris Safarova  02:43

I agree that is such a powerful quality to have, and it then allows you to constantly Dig, dig deeper, and uncover things that other people would not uncover, either through research or your own critical thinking.

 

Lionel Barber  02:54

Yeah, and I, obviously, I’ve worked in many places, abroad, in the country, in the UK. I mean, I started my career somewhat as an outsider in Scotland. I was English in Scotland in 1979 and that wasn’t necessarily easy, because there was a lot of strong Scottish nationalism around at the time. You know, seen as somebody from Oxford a bit privileged. I don’t think I did. Come from a particularly privileged background. My father left school when he was 1415, and he didn’t go to university. My mother didn’t go to college, so we weren’t well off, but he was in journalism, and he inspired me in that way. And then from Scotland, I worked in London, but then soon went to America. I worked there, worked at The Washington Post, on a fellowship, worked as the Washington correspondent, and then in Brussels for six years. So I covered the end of the Cold War in America, and then I spent a bit of time in California, then went to Brussels, covering the whole European construction, the single currency enlargement. And then, you know, took some executive jobs in London, running the news operation, but also went back to America and covered Wall Street and ran the American operation bit before coming the big boss, the editor in 2005 so I had a lot of foreign experience as a journalist, and then, as you say, as editor, you know, I I did two things, I suppose. One was to transform the Financial Times into a digital operation, going first and expanding the audience, but also then making it my business to interview leaders, because leadership has always fascinated me. So I did interview, you know, and if everybody from Vladimir Putin to Trump to Modi in India to two Chinese premiers too. Cyril Ramaphosa in South Africa. I traveled around the world as part of my job, and I think that gave me a different perspective and a better perspective as a person, as well as a journalist.

 

Kris Safarova  05:12

Very few people have such an incredible career. I wish we could speak for a very long time and we could learn everything we could from you. And thank you so much for writing books, because that is one of the ways to learn from you, although I would love to see a book about you as well.

 

Lionel Barber  05:28

Well, I did write a book, which were my private diaries as the editor of the Financial Times between 2005 and 2020 it’s got a rather strong title called the powerful and the damned private diaries in turbulent times, and it captures the sort of challenges of editing a newspaper very you know, I had one of the best journalist jobs in The World editing the Financial Times during the global financial crisis, the Arab Spring, the new cold war between America and China, the rise of authoritarianism and populism. All these trends and of course, obviously, perhaps most important of all this incredible technological revolution that we’re in the middle of now and that we’re seeing accelerate, which is transforming every aspect of human life. So all of that is in the book, and it’s what I’m concentrating on now.

 

Kris Safarova  06:36

And that is already out, that book.

 

Lionel Barber  06:39

It is. I published the book The powerful and the damned in 2020 so a few months after I stepped down as editor, and you can get it in paperback, you can get it in audible, read by me, and it’s the sort of view from the cat bird seat. It’s got a lot of name dropping, it’s got some humor. It’s got some stories about how you manage journalists. I describe it as managing 550 brilliant anarchists.

 

Kris Safarova  07:18

I’m looking forward to reading it. Thank you so much for sharing this Was there a specific moment in your career where everything changed for you, maybe a decision, a turning point that set you on the path to leading the Financial Times.

 

Lionel Barber  07:30

Well, the day I became editor, that certainly changed everything, because I was suddenly the big boss, and the buck stops with you when your editor. I mean, if you’re smart, you’ll, you’ll gather the best people around you so you’re capable of delegating, because nobody can do everything. So I made it my business to assemble the strongest team possible. It may. It did meant, it meant some changes. It made some difficult decisions necessary. But as I tell people, if you’re the editor, you’re not running a popularity contest, the most important thing is your guardian of the gold standard of journalism, and you’re responsible for excellence, and that means being fairly uncompromising, but it also means not being a, you know, not being a dictator, you have to be an enlightened, desperate how’s that bit like Frederick the Great?

 

Kris Safarova  08:33

I think that there’s a lot to think about there and explore. I can’t wait to read your book on this. Many people struggle to stand out in their careers so many of our listeners, they are very successful, but they want to have much bigger impact and much more influential roles within the organizations beyond curiosity, which is very important, what advice would you give to young professionals who want to make an impact in a competitive industry?

 

Lionel Barber  08:57

I’d give several pieces of advice. The first is you need to have multiple skills so you you can’t just be a writer. You need to understand the basics of coding. You need to be able to communicate across multiple platforms. You need to be able to go on video and audio so all and you need to be able to understand data. So that’s the first big change. You need to be sort of multitasking. The second is, I think it’s always good to have mentors. Find people who can teach you some things and teach you where the traps are. Don’t always be too much in a hurry. Be aware of what’s going on around you, and find mentors. And then the last thing i. Would do is many people who find this hard, and I certainly found it hard initially, is that when you speak, you need to get people to pay attention, and you need to be able to command a room, and that means being very clear about what you’re going to say, when you’re going to say it, and if you have to give a public speech, then make it short, but praying for it. And I think just one last piece, which is linked is a lot of people say to me, what’s the best way to do an interview? What’s the thing not to do? And I found this when I was interviewing very powerful people like Vladimir Putin, is you don’t want to interrupt him all the time. You should let him speak, and then you should not be tempted to fill the silence. Let them fill the silence, because that way you get more time to think you’re not in a hurry, but you also put them more at ease.

 

Kris Safarova  11:09

Very powerful advice, and you can also use it even in your conversations, especially important conversations you have in personal and professional life. That’s quite right, you mentioned commands in the room for someone who is struggling with that, what advice could you give?

 

Lionel Barber  11:23

Breathe properly. So when you go into the room, make sure you’ve just inhaled a little bit in and out, because if you’re not breathing properly, the first words that come out of your mouth will sound awful, and then you can never recover. The second thing to do is always find out who is in the room, because if you don’t know who you’re speaking to, you’ll never make an impact. And the third thing is, when you start speaking, if there’s a way of you looking at various people in the room, so don’t just focus on one person. Focus on several people. And if you recognize anybody say early on and as Jack, or as Jane was saying just the other day, and then you’ve got the audience on side. And the most important thing is to work out, what do you actually want to say? And don’t apologize, don’t say, I’ll only be brief, always find a way of finishing on a high note. So those are some of the tips.

 

Kris Safarova  12:44

Very, very powerful breathing. All of the things you said will make a huge difference. So I hope people will implement it, starting today. You obviously led ft through massive shifts. You discussed some of it today. How did you personally manage change and uncertainty in such a fast moving environment.

 

Lionel Barber  13:03

When I took over at the FT, the business model was broken, and I said that to the board, they were not very happy, but I said, it’s true. We we can’t just rely on advertising. We need to become a subscription business, and I will deliver the Journalism which will make people happy to pay for the journalism, but you need to figure out how this new business model will work. Subscription. The second thing I thought was, well, my predecessor kind of messed up a bit. He wasn’t that good, so I’m surely going to be able to do better than that. And the third is that if you’re a general in an army, you’re leading an army, and the army just wants to know which direction to March. It probably doesn’t know the right direction, and maybe the general doesn’t know a right direction, but as long as you’re not marching to Moscow in winter, because that’s not so good. You need to set a sense of direction to the troops and be clear about that. And then the last point, which was a very good piece of advice given to me by Sir Howard Stringer, who at that time was the head of Sony, an English, Welsh, American, first foreigner to lead Sony, the consumer electronics giant. And I said to him, What advice would you give me? And he said, You’re going to embark on a big period of change. So whatever you do, you need to be very clear that you need to articulate the message of change all the time, because you’ll think that you’ve got the message across after two times, but actually you won’t have even persuaded these journalists and. Is 10 times, or maybe 12 times. So you have to keep repeating the message of why change is necessary, how it’s going to happen. Think of a few phrases, and that’s what I did. You know, I talked about digital first, I talked about the importance of a return to the gold standard. And by repeating these phrases, suddenly all the other journalists started repeating them, and you started getting getting the army to march in the right direction.

 

Kris Safarova  15:31

Do you think that subscription model is still relevant? Because what happened is there were so many subscriptions, so many people went into subscription models that consumers, customers, then had too many subscriptions, then they started cutting it out.

 

Lionel Barber  15:45

Well, it’s more challenging. Now everybody’s gone that route, but first of all, this first mover advantage, and the second is, it all comes down to the brand, doesn’t it? And if you got a very powerful worldwide brand like the Financial Times, I think you’re going to get a certain amount of customer loyalty, but you need to be incredibly careful to get the best talent and to focus on the right subject so that people feel very attached to the brand and at the Financial Times, you know, if you think of the weekend, people really like reading it at the weekend. It’s an incredibly valuable product. It’s where, you know, we charge five pounds in the UK. It’s incredible. But there are things like lunch with the FT, you know, other features of the weekend, the essays and the columnists, all this needs to be constantly kept happy and fresh in order to make the proposition now, it may be true that the subscription model needs to be adapted a bit, and you’re certain certainly correct that, you know how the subscriptions pile up, but then you need to think about, what are the other ways of doing it? I think. I mean, I’m it’s not my challenge now. I mean, the fact is that the FT, we completely transformed the business with subscription because we we doubled the audience, and we got the double the paying, paying audience through digital but I think probably adding some extra products, value added products around that brand. Maybe conferences and clubs help a bit of them also generate revenue. But fortunately, I don’t have to worry about it now. I did my bit. It took nearly 15 years.

 

Kris Safarova  17:46

Yes, he did more than enough about that organization. How do you stay sharp and informed and continue developing yourself? Anything you will be comfortable sharing that people could potentially adapt for themselves.

 

Lionel Barber  17:59

First, I’m very competitive. I hate being beaten and but I also said, I don’t want to be first. I want to be right. I want to be correct. And the more experienced you get that, you know, we did some huge stories, particularly towards the end of my tenure as editor, particularly the wire card exposure. And if you haven’t seen that documentary, scandal, that sort of tells the story of the investigation into this Germany’s Enron, I mean, a huge financial scandal, $2 billion of losses, that money that disappeared, one of the top executives now in fugitive, financial fugitive in Russia, he was running half a spy operation. Was the most incredible story, and we’d never been able to do that, if it hadn’t been for, you know, putting a lot of preparation in first. But I loved that kind of reporting, and that kept me sharp. I think, making sure that you bring in new people who challenge you, that keeps you sharp. And the third piece of advice, apart from because you need when you bring in people, you can’t just bring in lots of people, I used to describe it as having a skin graft so you weren’t having a heart transplant, it was a skin graft. So you bring in somebody and try and socialize them, get them used to the culture of the Financial Times, and then tap their expertise. But lastly, I would urge any leader to go into the gym. I used to run 4k twice a week without fail. And if I got under 18 minutes, I knew I was as sharp and I was ready to go into battle and just do some weights, do some just have some downtime. And if you have a partner, you. And they’re prepared to be patient. That helps too, because you can’t have all the knowledge and all the pressure stored up in your own brain, you’ll go crazy.

 

Kris Safarova  20:10

And it’s interesting, when you start exercising, all other areas of your life improve as well.

 

Lionel Barber  20:16

I think it’s really important. I mean, I do cycling as well. I don’t do the 4k on the machine so easily, but I walk at least 10,000 steps a day. Still, I cycle. I could play a bit of tennis, and I think all of that kind of exercise is important so that you don’t get just get stuck in front of the computer that you’re out and doing physical as well as mental exercise.

 

Kris Safarova  20:47

I spoke earlier about subscriptions, and I wanted to ask you so you obviously did a remarkable job figuring out. How do you transition? How do you adapt the change in times for someone who’s listening to us right now, and they feel that their business is dying because the world has changed, and they have to find another business model. Are there any ways you can recommend they follow to kind of think about it, to maybe see something they’re not seeing right now?

 

Lionel Barber  21:13

Well, if your business is dying, the question is, are you aware it’s dying, or are you, in effect, Mr. Kodak, or Mrs. Madame Kodak, where the camera business is completely, you know, and they thought they could make the best camera, and that would save the business, and it didn’t. So the question is that, at what stage are we? Are we on the way to the funeral parlor? Or are we still got a two or three years to go? I mean, if you’re on the way to the funeral parlor, that’s pretty difficult. I mean, you have to access exercise some very, very powerful changes. You probably do need to reduce costs, but you can’t cut your way out of trouble. So I think probably the way I’d look at it is, what is the core of your business that you think is the most valuable, and is there any way that you’re neglecting that because you’re trying to do too many other different things, is there any way of going back to the core and slightly changing that? Is it a distribution problem? Is it a pricing problem? And then, is there anything that you know a friend of mine pivoted from tobacco to luxury. I mean, that’s not that’s pretty counterintuitive, but he had the money, and the tobacco business at that time was still profitable and making quite a lot of money, so he had the money to reinvest in a luxury brands business. So again, it the question of, you know, how big is your business, how the scale? And then maybe Lastly, you know, ask your workforce, what should we be doing next? I mean, again, you don’t necessarily have a monopoly on wisdom.

 

Kris Safarova  23:21

Wise words, you recently wrote a book, and you, of course, covered so many influential figures during your career. Why did you choose to write about Masayoshi Son?

 

Lionel Barber  23:32

Specifically, because so much money is involved in the masayoshi son story, not 10s of millions or hundreds of millions, but billions of dollars, billions of dollars made when he was investing in the likes of Yahoo or Alibaba, the Chinese Internet giant, but also billions of dollars lost in the.com bubble during the COVID pandemic. And this guy, Masayoshi Son, there’s no Western biography of him until he’s from Japan. He’s Korean. Japanese will come to that. It’s very important, because he’s an outsider in his own country. I decided there was no Western biography of Masayoshi Son. So I would I was opening a new market, and I was going to find, I was sure I was going to find some great characters and stories built around these billions of dollars.

 

Kris Safarova  24:37

And I’m very familiar with what it is like to be an outsider in your own country, because when I was growing up in Russia, I didn’t have Russian name. My father wasn’t Russian, so no one seen me as Russian. People would write on the walls, get out of Russia when I was a child, between my father outside the apartment building, so I really understood what he felt.

 

Lionel Barber  24:59

So, what’s your last name again? Just to remind me. (Safarova) Safarova, which is not Russian,

 

Kris Safarova  25:07

Yes, my father is from Azerbaijan.

 

Lionel Barber  25:11

So look, Masayoshi Son. That’s two names. Masayoshi is Japanese and Son is Korean, and when he was growing up, his family had a Japanese name, Yasumoto, but masa wanted to have he didn’t want to live undercover. He wanted to come out and be his own person. So I think that was a massive motivation for him to overcome his second class citizenship, his second class status, and he did it by actually leaving for America when he was a teenager and going to Berkeley in California. So that’s where he learned his English properly and where he went, came to grips with the microchip Internet revolution, not the internet, but microchip, which was sort of the technological foundation for his successes as businessmen.

 

Kris Safarova  26:11

And it is incredible how he realized he needed to go to us.

 

Lionel Barber  26:18

Well, his family didn’t want him to go to the US because, remember, his father had grown up in a shanty town, in a slum, a Korean slum after the war. And while he was a teenager, he left school at 14. His father was a bootlegger, a pig breeder, a loan shark, and then made his fortune in Pachinko gambling, which is this kind of semi underworld activity of slot machines, which the Koreans got into because that was the only area where they were Really permitted to work. They couldn’t work as teachers, they couldn’t work in the police force or in the local government or anything like that, because they were Korean. So, I mean, they could have done if they naturalized and become Japanese, but if they wanted to stay Korean, then they were right on the fringes of society. But mateoshi son said, I don’t want to go into slot machine gambling. I want to go into the business of my choice. And he decided to go into software distribution. And that was an idea that came to him when he was a student of California.

 

Kris Safarova  27:35

What surprised you when you were doing research for this book?

 

Lionel Barber  27:39

I thought he had a slightly better sense of humor than I imagined. I mean, he does like to joke. I think it’s a bit of a theater Act. The second thing that surprised me is I couldn’t believe how his risk appetite was ginormous. I mean, this is a man who’s bet the company numerous times. He’s prepared to do things that most people just wouldn’t have the stomach for the risk. And then I think there was a there were things that I found extraordinary about you know, is his ambition, and he wanted to be number one, not just in Japan, but in the world. He’s an empire builder. He’s compared himself seriously to Napoleon.

 

Kris Safarova  28:30

And his father used to tell him that he is genius.

 

Lionel Barber  28:34

It does do all sorts of odd things to you. If you’re told aged five that you’re a genius. I mean, you do feel a bit like a princeling. You think you’re right. And I think he did have a very inventive mind. I mean, he was telling his father how he could get more business through at the restaurants that he owned. And he claims to have been able to understand the principle of discounting in order to grow your market. So all these things marked him out as something special. And you do have to remember that he set up his own business in Japan, and he couldn’t get a bank loan. Nobody would lend him credit, so he had to rely on a mentor. I was talking about the importance of mentors earlier. And his mentor basically said, I am ready to mortgage my house so that you can get a loan. I’ll guarantee the loan via my house. That’s pretty amazing.

 

Kris Safarova  29:35

It is amazing, even many parents would not do it for you. Yeah, there you go. What do you think is different about his decision making? How does he make decisions differently from most people?

 

Lionel Barber  29:48

I think he really can go just on the gut. I mean, he did meet Jack maliba, and he made a decision to invest $20 million later. 100 million dollars into Alibaba, and Alibaba was only a few months old. Goldman Sachs had put some money in, but he just went in and and all his Chinese people present, the fellow investors said, No, we don’t want to put money in. Jack Ma, but he felt in his gut that that was the right thing to do, and of course, he was spectacularly right. He’s always gone with the gut, and we got it wrong with Adam Newman of WeWork, but he got it right with Jerry Yang, the co founder of Yahoo. So he does things with conviction. He’s really prepared to take risk, and he’s also prepared to take a lot of losses up front in order to grow the market. So he’s got an early Amazon business model, or a bit like ruper Murdoch and B sky b satellite broadcasting. You know, go for total market act. Think about total market access ability, and then think about your profit and loss account. He’s always been interested more in revenue than actually P&L.

 

Kris Safarova  31:08

There was a book sometime back called flying without a net about people who are very hard on themselves when they make mistakes. And my hypothesis is that masa, as you call him in the book, and I guess his family calls him that he’s not that afraid to make a mistake. He doesn’t punish himself for mistakes. He doesn’t punish himself for mistake, and therefore it is easier for him to make this big bats. Do you think there’s something there?

 

Lionel Barber  31:38

I think it’s that absolutely because he says, Well, I made that decision. I live with it. I mean, that’s what I did. What am I supposed to do? He also would say, if you come from nothing, and by the way, he was only poor for a few years. I mean, once his father got into Pachinko gambling, or even before you know, they were quite well off. So they weren’t, they didn’t spend a lot of time in the slum. He likes to play that up, but if you if you know that your parents have had nothing, then if you lose everything, you just go back to nothing. And that was what you were like. So I think he has that sort of philosophy. I do think that he likes to pretend that he’s really sorry he made the mistake, and he goes and does penance. He retires from public view, but actually he’s just plotting his comeback.

 

Kris Safarova  32:38

Do you think that people who have this very strong feeling of making a mistake, and then they punish themselves for it. They think it is one of the key things that is holding them back.

 

Lionel Barber  32:49

I do because I would fight. And I remember listening to Jeff Bezos when he first said this, He distinguished between good failure and bad failure. And bad failure is when you keep doing the same thing and you know you’ve made the mistake. So why are you doing the same thing over and over again? You’ve made you’ve given the person the job. They’ve messed up. I mean, why put them through the same problem? Or you’ve adopted this approach and it didn’t work. So why go back to it? I think there’s good failure where you’re trying very hard to do something and it just doesn’t come off for various reasons. That’s okay you learn as long as you learn from you know that’s good failure. So distinguishing between the two is very important.

 

Kris Safarova  33:41

It probably comes back to the time when he was growing up and he was his father’s potentially favorite son.

 

Lionel Barber  33:47

Yeah, it was the favorite son, yeah, second son.

 

Kris Safarova  33:52

Yes, he was told that he’s genius. So when you’re treated that way by parents, then you kind of use that same model for the way you treat yourself throughout the rest of your life.

 

Lionel Barber  34:01

I think that is true, that he considers himself something of a genius, and he would cite his father. His father told me, when I interviewed him, aged 87 in the family home, and the family home is full of photographs of the Father and the Son, often wearing baseball caps, and it’s a bit like a shrine. It’s extraordinary, but the father was so proud of his son that his prime son had become a mega billionaire. And, you know, he’d writ, he’d been rich, but his father, his son, had become super rich. So I think this privileged status, this sense that you are a princeling and a genius, that does encourage you to take risks, but it can also lead to, sometimes, I think, reckless behavior.

 

Kris Safarova  34:53

It is something that those listeners who are parents need to think about to what degree they need. Out the children that they are number one. How do you balance them having the self confidence, but at the same time not being reckless?

 

Lionel Barber  35:07

Yeah, it’s tricky, because obviously, if you’re going to make a bet on something and you’ve done a certain amount of homework, then you know sometimes you’re going to fail. I do quote in the book Thomas Edison. It’s one of my favorite quotes that because Master is constantly talking about his vision, and it’s a techno centric vision, it’s one that essentially says, I know I understand the path of technology and the the essence of technological pros progress. But as Thomas Edison said, vision without execution is hallucination. So execution is really important, and sometimes masa has not paid enough attention to the execution. He’s been carried away by the founder, just the vision. So think about the execution.

 

Kris Safarova  36:08

If you would summarize the key things people could learn from sand. What would you say?

 

Lionel Barber  36:15

Think about making money, not just as an innovator, a great innovator like Steve Jobs. You can make a lot of money as a middleman or a middle woman. You can position yourself, for example, like masa as a as somebody who is the gateway to Japan and China for the Americans. He did that brilliantly because he spoke English, but he understood the Japanese domestic market. I think also the power of FOMO. I mean, use the fear of missing out to get people to come on board or invest in you, because they’ll give you money if they think they’re going to miss out on a great opportunity. And matha is amazing at giving that sense of you could fear of missing out. That’s how he got all the money from the Saudis for the Vision Fund $45 billion that’s how he got money from older people that he could talk a great game about what was coming and they need people needed to give him money because he was he knew the future. He could see it. But obviously, at the same time, I think he showed some management weaknesses. Obviously, the Japanese continued, is very loyal, but some of the more other mercenary types, they were a lot of infighting, and that did a lot of damage to the company’s reputation. So I was wondering, you know, if he is the big boss, you should have sorted that out a bit earlier.

 

Kris Safarova  37:53

I wanted to wrap up with two questions outside of this topic. One is, are there specific routines, success habits. So to say that you follow on a daily or weekly basis that really help you be an incredible professional that you are.

 

Lionel Barber  38:08

well, I do think that the exercise point is really important, and still doing that so your mind is fresh. I think don’t get into a comfort zone. Always be thinking, Well, I’m doing quite well now, but there must be some way of I can do better or look at things differently, and that means you’ve got to be open to other people that you don’t just say it’s my way or the highway. I know what I’m doing. I mean, obviously, as the editor, when you’re making big decisions about stories, I even though I knew what I thought we should do. And you know, we’re being legally challenged. For example, on Wirecard a couple of times, I just brought in colleagues to find out what they thought, but I was also testing them to think about how good they were and whether their judgment was good. And at that time, I was planning succession, which is the last point that if you’re a leader, any responsible leader has to think about succession. So by the way, a question that Maseo shisan, the founder of SoftBank that employs 1000s of 1000s of employees, but there isn’t an obvious successor, and we don’t know what’s going to happen to Softbank when he when he passes, or I don’t think he will hand the rail it rains over.

 

Kris Safarova  39:38

Thank you. And the second question I wanted to ask. The last question for today is over the last few years, or even any amount of time you want to consider what were maybe two, three aha moments, realizations that really changed the way you look at life or the way you look at business.

 

Lionel Barber  39:55

One of the important challenges for the Financial Times was. Were we going to go with our new app into the Apple Store? And that would have meant handing over all our data to Apple and also paying them 30% of our revenues for our subscriptions gained through the app. And so we decided that we would not do that with we admired Apple. Apple is an incredible company. It continues to be an incredible company, with incredible products, consumer products, their stock price, their valuation, is amazing. But we decided we’re not going to be part of that. We’re going to we’re going to be confident enough in our brand that we won’t succumb to that distribution problem and hand over essentially the gold data, which is the consumer. We weren’t going to be disintermediated. And you know what? We got an enormous amount of respect from consumers and friends of the ft. We made new friends, because we were prepared to sort of stand up to the big guy, a very impressive big guy, but an impressive big guy. And so I think occasionally standing up to big, powerful things is a is a good, good thing to do. Think the second issue was, you know, on wire card. This was cost a lot of money to defend. We had legal bills, but I understood that. I did my due diligence with the reporters. I knew the reporters very well, and therefore I was prepared to have a fight. And it was, I was prepared to pay and get the board to understand that this was going to cost a lot of money, but in the end, the FT was going to be right. It was going to be absolutely a fantastic story. And as a result of having again a fight, a difficult one, but the value of sticking to your guns and sticking backing the reporters was had immeasurable value to the organization and and to the culture. And when you’re talking thinking about very important things for a company, like recruitment and retention, and I think they’re very important for an editor, because it’s all about talent. If you do something like that, which is obviously courageous, and you’re also right, you’re going to get 10 times the amount of benefits.

 

Kris Safarova  42:32

I know. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it, and I appreciate all your work. And can’t wait to read your book about your time being an editor. Where can our listeners learn more about you? Buy your book? Anything you want to share?

 

Lionel Barber  42:44

Well, you can follow me on Twitter. I have about 108,000 followers. They seem to have gone down for some reason since Elon Musk took over Twitter. X but there we are, but there’s still quite a lot of people who follow me. I’m also on Instagram @BarberLionel, and I’m on Blue Sky, same Lionel Barber, and I’m on LinkedIn, because I think LinkedIn is a very effective way of communicating to people, and so I offer my views. You can listen to a media podcast that I do every week called Media Confidential with Alan Rusbridger, the longtime former editor of The Guardian. So it’s two experienced ex-editors talking about the media. And then you can, you can follow some of the writing that I do sometimes the Financial Times or the spectator, and do read, above all, the new book Gambling Man: The Secret Story of the World’s Greatest Disruptor, Masayoshi Son, first western biography of one of the most consequential investors of our time.

 

Kris Safarova  44:04

Thank you, Lionel. Our guest today, again has been Lionel Barber. Check out Lionel’s book. It’s called Gambling Man: The Secret Story of the World’s Greatest Disruptor, Masayoshi Son. And our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills. You can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free download, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. And you can also get McKinsey and BCG-winning resume, which is a free download, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf. Thank you everyone for tuning in. And I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time.

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