When children behave in their averagely foul, unruly ways, the peace and civilisation of the office offers the most blissful refugel writes Lucy Kellaway
LAST TERM the son of a senior businessman got caught helping himself to another child's iPod and was suspended from his fancy London school.
This story of petty larceny is of keen interest to about a dozen people. To the businessman - who doubtless gave the boy a rocket - to the boy, his mother, his headteacher, his victim and the classmates who will have enjoyed the shiver of excitement that comes when someone else gets into trouble. Otherwise no one cared.
I happened to hear about it last week and didn't care much either. Yet the story made me wonder what might have happened - let us just suppose - if it had not been a businessman's child but Barack Obama's sweet-looking elder daughter who had taken it into her head to pinch a classmate's iPod. Then a lot of people would have cared: in fact, it might have cost her father the US election.
If you are a politician, especially an American one, your children are a danger to you. Their transgressions become your own, as Sarah Palin found last week when the world thrilled in horror to find that her schoolgirl daughter was pregnant.
Luckily for her mother, an engagement was swiftly drummed up and political disaster averted, but it was a close-run thing.
There is an obvious lesson here: unless you are childless, going into politics is a bad idea. Even quite nice teenagers delight in having unprotected sex, getting drunk, taking drugs, becoming anorexic or bulimic, and if you have five children - as Palin does - the chances of one of them inflicting collateral damage on you at some stage must be close to a certainty.
By contrast, if you are a business leader your children can screw up as much as they like without harming your career prospects at all. One could say this was unfair. Business leaders, like politicians, are meant to be examples to the people they lead. If they cannot even marshal a couple of schoolkids at home, why should one allow them to lead thousands of workers?
Three things are wrong with this line of thought. Keeping one's own teenagers constantly on track can be harder than keeping a company - or a nation - in line. The loving parents of misbehaving teenagers are often to be pitied as much as blamed.
And if the children of politicians and CEOs go off the rails more than most, it is not the poor leadership of the parents that is to blame, but their jobs, which generate too much money and fame, and keep them in the office round the clock.
Shareholders seem to have their thinking on this pretty straight. They are not sentimental about character (as electorates increasingly are). And from their point of view, if something has got to give, it is better that the children are neglected than that things at the shop are allowed to slide.
Children of businesspeople need to go spectacularly off the rails for anyone to take any notice at all. Patty Hearst got herself kidnapped and joined the revolutionaries, but she was special. Paris Hilton is special too - for being the world's most overrated celebrity. She might go to prison for drink-driving, but I doubt if room occupancy rates at any of the hotels founded by her family have registered the scandal.
Even when the disgraced child works at the same organisation as the parent, the damage is minor. The son of Sandy Weill, ex-head of Citibank, left his powerful job at the bank abruptly a few years ago and checked into drug rehab. While there was a certain amount of crowing on the internet, the career of Weill snr sailed triumphantly on.
In theory, damage could be done when the values espoused by the child are at loggerheads with those of the parent, but in practice no one minds much or for long. The queen (who is the head of a family business of sorts) has as her leading brand value a stiff upper lip. This trait was not in evidence in the hideously emotional divorce of her eldest son. But did that hurt the queen? After a bit of a dip, she is now more popular than ever.
Likewise, Eddie Izzard, the famous transvestite comedian, is the son of an accountant. The son's antics do not seem to have held back the father - Harold Izzard has just won an award for "outstanding service to the profession of internal auditing".
I can only think of one business person who has been brought down by the behaviour of his son: Martin Lukes. Earlier this year, the chief executive of a-b global was found guilty of passing insider information to his stockbroker son and is now in prison.
The only routine damage a troubled child can inflict on a parent's career is by being so troubling that they distract the parents from their work. Failing this, children are more likely to help than hinder. For a start, they are expensive. It costs so much to get them through school and university that parents need to work hard and go on working hard for an awfully long time.
Second, children provide a parallel world. When the office is unbearable, there are children to distract. And when the children behave in their averagely foul, unruly ways, the peace and civilisation of the office offers the most blissful refuge.
But the biggest service offered by children to their high-flying parents is to take them down a peg or two. Teenagers routinely tell their parents they are a piece of scum. If the parent is a chief executive with a big ego, this is an invaluable service, as no one else would dare perform it. - ( Financial Times service)
