Lionel Barber

0:00The Gstaad Guy:Well, Lionel, Lionel Barber, thank you so much for being here on the Gstaad Guy podcast. It's great to be on the Gstaad Guy podcast. Thank you. I had the pleasure of hearing you speak at Brilliant Minds and approached you right after you rushed off the stage. And I wanted to learn more about your life, your story. I have been aware of your name for a long time. is the ex-editor-in-chief of the FT, an author, an explorer. You have your own book, The Gambling Man, which has just come out in paperback in the UK, which is a big deal. And you are also reading the audiobook yourself. So for people who like the way you speak on this podcast, they can hear more.

0:40It's the ultimate test. It's the ultimate test. Because Gambling Man is about a Japanese entrepreneur, Masayoshi Son of SoftBank. So the key is that I wasn't allowed to do my Japanese accent. And you can probably understand why.

0:54The Gstaad Guy:Around the world with your host, the Stad Guy. We welcome you back to the Stad Guy podcast, sharing stories of excellence with those in the know for those who just know. I'd love to start a conversation with your idea of journalism and what journalism means to you. You dedicated a massive part of your life to journalism. and 15 years as the editor-in-chief of the FT. I'd love to know about the why. My father was a journalist. He came from a very modest background in Leeds in the north of England, and he left school when he was barely 15. So he was self-taught, he didn't go to college, and he always used to tell the three sons that journalism was the best possible job, that it's not a business, it's not a profession, it's a vocation.

1:55And what he meant by that is that it's something which is deeply serious. It's about finding the truth and reporting facts. Obviously, there's commentators and people offer opinions and there's all the excitement, which we'll talk about. with the new journalism built around digital. But at its heart, it is about providing for an informed citizenry and a democracy. So I take it quite seriously. But of course, I've had a lot of fun as well.

2:31The Gstaad Guy:And would you say that the driver to become a journalist is fundamentally to be curious? Absolutely. Most important quality. I tell all people who think they want to be a journalist that the greatest quality you can have is to be curious and not to be cynical. Because if you've already made your mind up and you're not interested in exploring things or finding out things and then trying to organize them into a story or a column or informing people, then you're never going to be any good at all. so curiosity i think that applies to other parts of life by the way but particularly important for journalism has that always been part of your dna not always i think i've always wanted to express myself and i was obviously not obviously i mean i i kind of flirted a bit with uh theater I was the drum major in Wojciech's, in Bouchner's Wojciech.

3:37And I liked doing a little bit of play, but I wasn't really very good. And I thought, well, I'm not going to be a politician because I'm not flexible enough, shall we say. So I thought actually, and I hesitate about journalism because following one's father is always a bit of a problem. so I thought I'd never be as good as him but then I thought actually the only job that I've been offered is one job in journalism in Scotland and I think I really want to do it and that that's that's that's that's the job for me and when was that that was in 1978 I just finished my degree at Oxford in German and modern history.

4:24Wow. And I thought, you know, Scotland, never been there. I was from London, England, didn't travel that much in the family, apart from actually to Germany and France. And I thought, yeah, I'm going to do it. And it's going to be an adventure because if you've spent three years at Oxford, one year in Germany as a student, then going to Scotland felt something like new and very exciting.

4:50The Gstaad Guy:And what were you covering there? Well, the problem was that I didn't have anything to cover because I was just English in a sea of Scots. And I didn't have any specialist knowledge, so I didn't really know. But of course, if you're in journalism, you need to have a speciality. Well, clearly I couldn't be a reporter on German literature. So I thought about health, but I'm not a scientist, so I was useless at that. And then I went to, I'll always remember this, in 1980, I went to Glasgow and there was Mrs. Thatcher's intellectual guru who was a man called Sir Keith Joseph. And he was talking to a bunch of businessmen.

5:32And I remember him saying, why is this country? And you've got to remember, in the late 70s, 1980, Britain was a terrible place. I mean, we were seen as the sick man of Europe. Nothing was happening. The unions were out of control. And Keith Jowler said, business is the most exciting thing. If you're a businessman, think of all the dramas, the ups and downs. And I suddenly thought, actually, that's what I should write about because it seems very exciting. There was only one problem. I didn't know anything about business and certainly not finance.

6:07The Gstaad Guy:I think most people who start out in business know a little about business. That may be true. But if you're in journalism, you probably need to have some idea. but of course it was new terrain and uh they were good they were good to me they kind of agreed to train me a little bit now my knowledge probably went only a skin skin deep but it was enough in 1981 to be named the young journalist of the year in britain and the scotsman had never won that and i got these telegrams and i got letters and there was one from the first scottish national mp national snp member of the european parliament and it said i'll try and do the accent dear lainel i'm so brude that a scortsman like lainel barber has won the young genesis a year in britain congratulations you have some bad news for him yeah for her i'm english i couldn't break the news it was too hard you have to take the award yes i did i got it and that was why i got hired by the sunday times in 1981 and joined the business news section beautiful yeah what did business look like in 1981 well i it was terrible because we had a strong pound and british industry was completely uncompetitive.

7:34So we had all this manufacturing industry was collapsing. So I was made the industrial correspondent. And my colleague said that being industrial correspondent during the Thatcher government was a bit like being the monastery's correspondent under Henry VIII. There's nothing to cover. But I do on the serious side, I mean, I remember going to see these business people along with a much more experienced reporter because I didn't really know the right questions and we would interview executives and at least two of them broke down in tears as they were describing the job losses and the technique that I learned from my colleague who had glasses and sort of silvery pepper salt hair, salt and pepper hair, he had terrible dandruff.

8:29So he'd get so excited that he'd start rubbing his hair and going, mm-hmm, like this, and the cloud of dandruff would appear. And therefore the businessman just wanted to get us out of the office because of all the dandruff. Oh, my God. And they told us everything. It worked. yeah i mean actually did i want dandruff i mean i'm interested in a story but not

8:51The Gstaad Guy:not too much dandruff yeah fine how quickly did you have to share the story with the rest of your team at the time given that was a very different way of of doing business well again you have to remember and it's i think it's worth reflecting because obviously I did very well later and I was the young journalist of the year but I didn't know very much and everybody at the Sunday Times was 15 years older and I remember they sent me off to cover the fishing industry in Hull well first first first of all it's called Ull not Hull and I went there and I interviewed I went down to the cafes and I interviewed a few fishermen and I came back and I was having trouble writing it because obviously I didn't feel the fishing industry.

9:42I think I wrote that story about six times. And at the end, the editor literally tore it up in front of my eyes and said, this is useless. And I said, why? And he said, it reads like Mills and Boone, which is a kind of popular romance. I mean, I tried to make it heartfelt and i just it was it was utterly terrible but if you've had a story torn up in front of your eyes i mean that's pretty humiliating and i figured i wasn't sure whether i could do this after that so you then have to that's when your resilience comes in and you kind of have to see i'm not going to let these people get me down and try and come back how did you come back two things great question as they say two things the first was i asked advice and i found another journalist who actually worked on the financial times and i'd met him on a young koenigswinter conference in berlin and this chap said to me your problem is that you don't have a patch.

10:57You don't have something specific that you're covering. You're kind of all over the place, and therefore you won't make any mark. So that was very good advice. And the second piece of advice was somebody said you should interview people because if you're trying to write about the fishing industry, of which you know nothing, and you don't feel it, whereas if you interview somebody, then you can write a bit of a profile and you get them to talk and then your confidence will get better and that probably will help well that was very good advice did you go back and interview the fishermen no i interviewed a government minister as one does yeah i thought that was safer

11:40The Gstaad Guy:it probably is safer so you took the leap of faith really into political interviews really Yeah, business at that time. Politics came a bit later after I joined the Financial Times. I mean, yeah, I interviewed that government minister, but I sort of was trying to write about smaller businesses. And then I wrote about the City of London, finance. I was a bit more experienced by then. And as a result of that, I was then offered a job at the Financial Times. And the parting words, which is, again, for everybody who's thinking careers go in straight lines, they don't. Because somebody said to me at my leaving party at the Sunday Times, you're going to be buried.

12:30Nobody's going to hear about you anymore. because you were at the Sunday Times, you were making your mark, joined the Financial Times, it's over.

12:38The Gstaad Guy:It's charming. He was absolutely charming. And then somebody was driving, a very senior journalist, same thing, drove past me in his car, stopped, wound down the window and said, you're a rat. So I said, if I'm a rat, you're a sinking ship. I thought, I'm not having this. Anyway, this is all by the, by way of saying there are moments in everybody's career when you get a challenge and you have to push back. Absolutely. What did the Financial Times look like at the time when you joined? It was very much a paper of record, so we'd have all sorts of lots and lots of stories at the back, small companies, three-paragraph stories.

13:22They covered everything. But, of course, because there was no digital side, um we we you needed to go to the financial times to find out you know share price movements uh and company results the on the other hand the paper was um unique in britain and it's why i wanted to join because it had a huge foreign correspondent network they'd made a brilliant decision in the 70s to invest in a foreign network it's like having a intelligence network all around the world i mean of course we weren't spies but you know you'd have four people in washington six people in new york three three people in in in germany and all that uh three or four in front paris so i thought i want to be a foreign correspondent that's what i really want to do So that's another reason why I joined the FT.

14:23And I also noticed, and this is important, that the Sunday newspapers, they were beginning to feel it was harder to do something different because during the week, someone like the Financial Times were doing more in-depth background stories. so it was it was fairly male not many senior women very serious um i got told the first in the last job interview by the way you've got the job but we don't want any of your so-called sunday times scoops which i took as a real insult you did yeah i thought you take it as a compliment no i think they basically so you know we're hiring you but basically all your stories that had been on the front page the last three years were made up.

15:11Oh, they weren't.

15:12The Gstaad Guy:I assume they weren't. I got over myself. How did the timeline of hearing news or experiencing news or having a great interview to publishing it change over time while you were with the Financial Times? Well, it was huge because when I joined, I mentioned those small stories. I mean, we had to do, I don't know, five stories by 7 o 'clock, 7.30. Wow. If you did a big interview, it had to be done on the day. We had this huge piece which occupied a page, nearly a page. That was about 2 ,300 words. You know, big, deep analysis. If there was some huge bid, then you'd have to do it on the day. And that's a really tough ask.

16:05So when I moved to Washington, I mean, I was getting up at 4.30 in the morning, which would be 9.30, and then working through until about 10 o 'clock Washington time and then filing. But as the Internet took off, which was 99, 2000, suddenly people began to say, they began to draw a distinction between sort of fast news. You can do it immediately. um and by the way you can do it any time of day yeah and then the slow news well that can wait and so everything changed everything speeded up um i think there's a rush to judgment often not so much of the financial times but you know because everything was instant um i think it presented some real challenges.

17:02So when I became editor in 2005, after a long stints away in Washington, Brussels, and then New York, I mean, I think I was 50. So I was able to influence a lot how we tackled some of these questions and say, we're not going to rush things. We're going to be competitive, but we're not going to rush.

17:26The Gstaad Guy:To my understanding, you in many ways won that competition on digital, where Financial Times became the leader in digital news quite quickly. Yeah, we did undergo a revolution. I mean, it wasn't a Maoist revolution, because people tend to disappear in that kind of thing. I mean, it was very tough evolution. So it took several stages for us to get to where we needed to be in in digital but the two or three things that i said from the outset we needed to do were um one have a separate news operation that was digital with news desks um and then into then bring it together with the news desk so you couldn't have it to be print led i everything result revolving around the newspaper we needed to get it to a position where the digital form was first and the newspaper was was a derivative and then we needed to explore all the amazing things that you could do with digital and obviously that's the moving picture that's video that means journalists suddenly appearing on audio form like podcasts as well as video all that we had to do at once and then we had to crucially which is where i think we did lead was say people are going to pay for this and they're going to pay quite a lot of money and obviously the business side supported this and i said i'll deliver the journalism you deliver the business model and it worked and so that and you maintain the pink paper oh that's crucial because Because it's like a luxury item.

19:12The Gstaad Guy:It's also a status signal. Definitely. I read the FT. Have the pink paper. Yeah. And whereas people used to have the pink paper with a bowler hat, they don't have that now. But pink, or when I was in America, we never used to call it pink. Okay. Because that's dangerous. It could be pink. You're pinky, political, you know, communist or something. So we'd say it's salmon color. Oh, salmon. Well, or peach if you're in Georgia. Okay. Yeah. I always would bucket a person to a certain bucket when I would see them reading the FT growing up and still till today. I think it still has that certain status to it.

20:01Caché is one way of looking at it. Status. I agree with that. I'm quite unashamed about, you know, when I was editor, about bigging that up. Because if you're going to charge somebody, you know, a cup of coffee, then it better be worth it. And that means you've got to find people who are truly original in their thinking, great writers, you know, and finding, recruiting and retaining those people. meanwhile doing this digital transformation was the biggest challenge but now i i always said and you know that we're a premium product but i also said that we were not we were like special forces you know lethal small but lethal did you start your thinking while putting the teams together with am i choosing the right people to satisfy the reader or are you starting with

21:02The Gstaad Guy:who the reader is and working back from there? Well, it was several things. I mean, first of all, I think, you know, it's 15 years ago now when I took over, but actually more, sorry, 20 years ago. God, time flies. But, you know, I got the job because the previous guy hadn't messed up a bit and we'd kind of lost a bit of direction. I hadn't expected to get the job. I mean, I'd not thought that I could get the job, But then I was sitting in New York thinking, this place is not doing well. Maybe they'll give me the job. And if they give me the job, then I've got to have a plan. So it was only, I began to think about that.

21:43And the question you ask is really important, which is, it's not about you. I mean, obviously, I'd worked at the paper for 20 years when I got the job, almost 13 years abroad. but I knew actually it's more than that it's 16 years abroad but I knew who the reader was the readers that you know they're smart they're international so you know and they're pretty well pro-business I mean we can't kind of we've got to be enthusiastic about business we've got to be critical but what we can't do is say oh capitalism's finished because of the dot-com boom or something like that bust so i i i went about it saying first of all what really matters is knowledge about modern finance so capital markets are really important right who have we got right this person actually was jillian tett um seems to me to be really smart and so i'm going to promote her immediately and then i'm going to look at the intellectual capacity and is it good enough and the people who are really big i'm going to promote i'm going to make them big names i'm going to be like some hollywood movie producer making the actors yeah definitely because there are stars yeah i mean some people didn't like that because they hate it like if you're just talking about stars where does that leave me i remember we created something called the a-list and then one of the top commentators came in to see me and said does that mean i'm on the b-list i mean the egos i said let me think about that but but i think the so it's a mix of things and then there's the sort of management team where if you're fortunate i think it was old enough to realize that you want people who are going to challenge you.

23:48They have to be loyal, but you don't want a lot of yes women or yes men. That's a terrible thing. So I think I had enough knowledge. Obviously, you don't get it right first time, but the measure of success is, first of all, yeah, the readership went up. We got a million plus paying readers. But then the leadership team actually, when I stepped down after 15 years, just nearly, you know, nobody left. Even the disappointed candidates. They thought the institution was big enough that it wasn't just about them or me. And I think that's good. I mean, I care about that. I like that kind of leadership.

24:31The Gstaad Guy:The increase in readership and popularity is an easy measure of success, I would say. If you look at the numbers, they don't lie. but on a personal level when interviewing people and crafting stories and sharing a message, all driven by that curiosity you're talking about, what was your personal measure of success? I think the technical term is a holy shit story. Just where you walk out that interview and you go, wow, I can't wait to get to the computer and file this. that was like the interview with Vladimir Putin where we were in the Kremlin waiting for four hours and then we finally get in there and I greet him in German and he answers me in German back and I'm playing and he said where did you learn where did you learn your German and I said actually at Oxford and I said but I didn't just learn it at Oxford or in Germany but also at Oxford where I studied modern history and he looked at me and in German said to me and I'm going what's what's modern history he says to me and I go oh god what am I going to say and it was like being hit by Joe Frazier you know it was so I my brain was scrambled and then I said to him back in German everything after 1989 that's modern history and then he said sit down so the thing is I knew that that would be a great story you can write about it tell about it I mean, that I got really excited about.

26:05And then when he said the liberal idea is obsolete, that kind of story when you're in the meeting with someone powerful, big world leader and you walk away. But, you know, there are other things. We did some great investigations. Wirecard, the investigation into the German payments company with those like Enron. When, you know, we had to fight for months. The whole German establishment was after us, threatening us with criminal sanctions. but then there'd be some just stories where you know people were just day in day out producing great journalism and very high stakes so global financial crisis when literally the world almost melted down you know i think that was a very exciting time but where you you knew it was a collective effort not just me or a reporter in a big meeting yeah like the moment

27:02The Gstaad Guy:with vladimir putin using humor and that very relaxed opener yeah is that something you would always do to just lighten yes i i i figured that if as long as i did it in i hope a classy way with a little bit of impishness, not too much, but where you get the people's attention. So I deliberately spoke to Vladimir Putin in German because I knew he spoke very good. He speaks excellent German. I mean, it's accent frei. He is really, you know, because he was a spy in Dresden. But similarly with Donald Trump, when I interviewed him, you know, I rehearsed my opening line, which was, you know, we were in the Oval Office And I said, thank you, Mr.

27:55President, for making Time Series. And thank you for subscribing to the Financial Times. And he looked at me and he just went, that's OK. You lost. I won. So there was a little bit of a game. You know, he was a step. I was putting my little patch. He shot back. You know, I think these things are worth doing because always the opener to a conversation is incredibly important. And if you're too bowing and scraping and thank you very much and your nose is on the floor, Putin will wipe the floor. You know, he will take you to the cleaners. Or Trump too because these are powerful people. Now, you know, if you go to see the chairman of the Federal Reserve, you know, you probably a little bit slightly different, you know, comment probably.

28:51The Gstaad Guy:I get the question all the time of how do you approach people in power and people who are powerful. So these two examples are great, but is there a formula that you have that you can share that you've even used away from the pen, away from journalism and in your own personal life of using humor, using this lightheartedness to connect with people? Yeah, I mean, I don't think I did it earlier, by the way. i mean obviously if you're the editor you know you you have a certain station i mean obviously you're not president of russia yeah or president of the united states and i by the way i would also be in france if you go in the elisee i mean it's so french that you know making a little english joke probably doesn't work even in french i think i think my french accent isn't really good enough to make a joke in French.

29:47But I think, so it does depend a bit. I mean, I remember, I'll give you one other example because I'm thinking about where did I use humor? I remember being in Colombia and this was the last interview of a Latin American trip we'd done. We'd been in Argentina and Brazil and went to Colombia and I was with the Latin American editor. And you go into the president's palace and I mean, the security is unbelievable. It's bigger than the Knesset in Jerusalem. I mean, it's just, you know, really, really, really tight. And there are women guards wearing guns and everything. And anyway, I went in and sitting there and would you like a coffee?

30:45you know after three coffees and two hours i'm going where is this interview and so i said to my colleague you know where what's going on and he said i don't know anyway i was conscious of this person behind me and i i looked back and it was this little guy and he said uh senor barbara and i said yes barbara yes financial times he said el presidente very sorry for me he very busy uh he has a big important delegation from venezuela and he see you in one hour okay thank you very much and he walks off and i looked at my colleague and i said i can't believe it another hour that's three hours anyway who was that little guy then he said that was the president so i kind of went that was very funny but i thought when i go and see him i've waited three hours i can't let him get away with this yeah so after saying well you i realize you're very busy i asked him one question about his venezuelan problem on trade and the second question i said was i just looked at him and i said um mr president um uribe i said if two terms were good enough for george washington why aren't they good enough for Uribe because he wanted to stand for the third term and he got up and he literally started advancing to me with fists and I thought he was going to hit me and then he kind of stopped and he gave a big smile and he said because I'm waiting for my Thomas Jefferson and I thought that again that was where you can say something and there's a little bit of humor but you always get a great reaction you're going to get a reaction especially

32:31The Gstaad Guy:from these kind of people you have to stand your ground with your joke i think it's important yeah but if you're going to do the joke you have to do it with conviction yeah but you know that i try to know it i'm not to your i'm not my my audience is very different i'm not joking with presidents directly at least they might be watching yeah and if i'd gone to zelensky in kiev i would not be making a joke you know and i might say at some point but you know by the way i'm the one who's bringing the ammunition you know or something like that you know just something where you might be able to just leave but you'd have to at the same time especially in the early interviews acknowledge you know here he is people have tried to assassinate him he's a war leader that's got to be solemn and serious right i mean ultimately you're putting yourself in the field experiencing things learning from people yeah and then storytelling and through the storytelling connecting with the reader after having connected with the people you're interviewing and i think now more than ever we're in an era where people are journalists without even knowing i think you made a very clear decision to become a journalist, but because of the way media has moved and the way people are putting messages out so easily and so frequently, lots of people have assumed the role of journalists passively as a hobby without even realizing.

34:01The Gstaad Guy:But they're always actively trying to find that connection with their audience and find a great way to tell a story and tell a message. You're the expert here. what does it take to create that great connection with the audience in the same way that you were making that amazing connection with the people you're interviewing again it's a really a good question because um it involves several things i think first of all there's a difference between the citizen journalist who is just blowing off, sounding off on opinion. Like me. Or, no, I wouldn't say that. Or also someone who's just repeating a rumor or, you know, coming out with something that seems sensational, but it sort of disappears in 10 seconds under scrutiny.

34:55So we have to distinguish between those people who are doing sort of quasi-journalistic things as opposed to what I call journalism, which is still a kind of crafted message. And I don't mean crafted in a sinister sense. I mean, actually, you're taking time to think about the words, the images, and what it is. Now, to establish the connection, I actually think that showing some humanity is important. so that means a bit of modesty from yourself but also where you're trying to connect with the person that you're writing about or certainly or especially when you're interviewing so that means empathy humanity at the extreme end if you like but empathy um then i think if you're doing the kind of journalism you know i'm on i started a substat column it means giving in a way that was not true you asked this question earlier in our conversation about what the financial times was like well in 1985 i mean god forbid that you as a reporter showed any of your own personality i mean we don't want any of that would be the answer whereas i think now with substack with others where you have a picture associated with you or also the humor.