A Career Suicide Note

Like many people of my generation (the over-50s), I have retired from work and will not be going back. This is why.

I could do non-executive director work. I have a good enough CV, with a wide variety of operational and executive experience gained in global firms, emerging companies and start-ups. I have line management experience in sales, marketing, project management, development, tech support and a good understanding of finance, administration and IT systems gained from selling them to global companies. I ran country and regional operations. I have been a founder, investor and working director in five tech companies that went on to four trade sales and one IPO. I am not Elon Musk but this is useful stuff.

Academically, I worked alongside Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman as a visiting fellow at KCL and Professor Tom Kirkwood (BBC Reith Lecturer) at Newcastle University. For both I brought bite, speed and determination from startups to bear on projects that delivered value from their world-leading academic efforts. U.K. universities massively underperform by comparison with the U.S. when attempting to ‘spin out’ academic knowledge into the economy. Someone with personal experience of fighting that battle (it’s mainly against internal enemies) would surely have something to contribute as a non-executive or adviser.

On projects, where the U.K. is world class at disaster, (can any country compete with our record for bringing them home late, over budget and failing to deliver their promised benefits?) I combined decades of industry experience of running successful projects with a postgraduate Masters at Oxford University that allowed me to see my career out by helping organisations take straightforward steps to avoid failure. I have been invited back to speak to Masters students at Oxford on this, and to organisations that turn to Oxford for help when they are about to start a high risk and strategically significant project.

I have published technical papers in serious journals and been invited to give lectures at conferences to real experts, including that most exclusive and intellectually superior audience – medical doctors – who I sucked up to by starting my lecture with “It’s not often I can say I am definitely the most stupid person in the room” before pistol whipping them with the social ‘science’ of why it is unethical to mandate compulsory prescription of statins to everyone over 60, even if it would increase average life expectancy across the herd.

Finally, I am socially okay. I am not arrogant, domineering, greedy, power-grabbing or any other toxic behaviour that we correctly associate with many ‘successful’ people. I know how to operate in a team. I don’t want the glory. I derive enormous satisfaction from helping other people achieve their potential. I actually care about people!

Put that lot together and it’s a useful bag of spanners that could be turned to the advantage of many an organisation, and I would love to do it, but I won’t.

The reason is the one that I feel is responsible for many of my generation choosing retirement and walking away with our knowledge and experience. To go back, we would have to conceal our views on a set of subjects that would cancel us. In fact, if I mentioned my views out-loud to HR they might arrest me on the spot. Here they are a perfectly legal and reasonable spread of beliefs.

• I believe there are some situations where women who do not have a penis are entitled to separate treatment.
• I don’t believe all migration is good.
• I don’t believe all white people are racist.
• I believe scientific based knowledge is superior to cultural belief systems.
• I don’t believe it is okay for activists to break the law.

And, to cap it all, I voted for Brexit, and would like to say so, without suffering the bigotry that flows from that. I am not a Daily Mail reader, little Englander, racist, xenophobe, populist, fascist, gammon, uneducated football hooligan etc. etc. My concerns about EU membership stood me alongside Frank Field, who in my judgement was the most principled ‘social and economic justice’ politician of the last 50 years.

Given a modicum of unemotional time and space I can explain and defend every one of these positions, while maintaining a pristine set of liberal democratic values. Unfortunately, that is not on offer. One word ‘off message’ and the response is swift and emotional. To use words such as “can we calm down and examine the evidence” is now seen as provocative and is dismissed as ‘tone policing’ by shouty people who believe they have a moral monopoly and a right to be angry and offended.

It’s a shame but I no longer want to sit silently in the presence of HR and PR culture guardians. Not only is it bad for my blood pressure but I risk internal injury from suppressing laughter. But somehow, DEI and ESG has captured CEOs and organisations. Dissent is career suicide. For me, as with most mature (both senses of the word) employees, survival is contingent on constant, vigilant self-censorship. I wouldn’t go back to that for all the tea in a global consumer goods company. Regaining the power of free speech is something I looked forward to in retirement and I don’t want to give it up.

It’s sad that even from the safety of retirement I hesitate in making these statements. It is sad that people who are old, white and male face so much hostility. If you talked to me at a bus stop you would find a nice, friendly, smiling, tolerant, supportive person who throughout his career has fought to open opportunities for people regardless of gender, ethnicity, religion or class.

Back in 2016 I nearly laughed when I passed the Oxford University training course on ‘unconscious bias’. It was funny because I had been invited to review the Oxford Admissions process after spending years criticising it for being biased against minorities. Ironic or what? The training (which was influenced by the White Fragility works of Robin DiAngelo) was as laughable as anything I have ever seen from sociology. A stupendous achievement. It’s not that bias or racism doesn’t exist. It does and there is something of value in Critical Race Theory and intersectionality. But the absolutism and malignant spite of this mob is unacceptable. Academic careerism and opportunism at its worst. It is too extreme. It goes too far. It is counterproductive. It reaches its peak of condescension and offensiveness in its treatment of black people. This isn’t the way to build on progress against (real) racism. if I went back to work, I would never be able to say such things.

As a part-time academic I devoted a lot of effort to applied work to reduce income inequality which I believe is tearing society apart and was the real cause of the Brexit protest vote. It exasperates me that the trendy Johnny-come-lately diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) activists are now in control with their mission to make organisations ‘look good’. Looking good is the game, not being good. I have sat in rooms with top lawyers and their global clients when I have proved we can track pay inequality even down to the most complex ‘intersectional’ comparison in an instant with modern tech and at this news they stop the meeting. For all their high talk about diversity and equity, they don’t want to risk a legal ‘discovery’ liability. In other words, they know they have skeletons in their cupboards and like to hide behind the defence that they haven’t heard it is possible to track them down. This is what ‘good’ looks like.

I have also heard of DEI execs, usually from HR, who petulantly demand pay and job equity data on ethnicity, and when technicians request tangible definitions of ethnicity, they are criticised for being obstructive. Sorry, for being white, male and old about this, but surely we need tight definitions to present reliable data. We can provide data if they can provide definitions. The trouble with ethnicity (as anyone who has done a DNA heritage test will know) is that it does not divide into sharply, biologically defined, objective, measurable and distinct buckets. Ethnicity, as presented by DiAngelo et al., is dependent on subjective generalisation. Most people have a view of what they are and what other people are, but this is not a scientific test to accurately divide individuals into white, black or any other ethnicity, and woe betide you if you get it wrong. The fact is everyone is a mix. Ethnicity definitions vary by culture, country and regulatory environments. Unfortunately, raising legitimate technicalities is “obstructive” in the Lewis Carrol world of HR – or is it Violet Elizabeth Bott, whose catchphrase when she can’t have what she wants is “I’ll scream and scream until I am sick”? Either way it’s impossible to have a grown-up conversation. Ask for a definition of ethnicity, and the reply will be “you know what I mean”. Six-year-olds argue like this.

To supply another example, now HR systems can record more than two genders you might think ‘job done’. Put your tick where you identify and away we go. But, as systems persons who have wider responsibilities than simply making activists happy, we must think of the consequences now that the data have changed. Gender data are used in many ways other than determining which toilet you can use. For example, actuaries refer to it to calculate life expectancy and health insurance risks, which must then be priced and budgeted for. Putting a tick in a new box based on your self-identification today (or even part way through today and back again tomorrow) undermines these calculations. That’s okay, but we need to discuss how we accommodate that in a calm, logical, rational, quantitative way. Except to suggest such a discussion will risk all the usual accusations of tone policing, micro-aggressions, gas lighting, X shaming etc. etc.

Anyway, you get the message. I am sorry but I prefer to watch daytime telly rather than suffer all this to make a lifetime of hard-earned experience available to help organisations who would benefit from it. And it’s not just me but all those other 50-plus middle managers, trade and craft professionals and scientists who no longer want to spend every day tying their tongue in knots to avoid revealing their perfectly sensible and legitimate but unfashionable views. To our tormenters in HR and PR, most of whom would struggle to wire a plug: you won, but you lost.

Ken Charman is CEO of the Build-a-Plane CIC. He retired as CEO of uFlexReward, a Unilever tech startup. As a tech startup founder, he has experienced four successful trade sales and an IPO. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and was a Visiting Senior Fellow in War Studies at KCL.