Tidying up has been high on the agenda here at the FT offices, too – we are moving to new premises in a few months’ time, and are being encouraged to ruthlessly cull the assorted detritus that has accumulated in our little wing of the building, and keep it that way when we get to our new home. It is proving quite a battle of wills. The business of analysing companies is a rather messy one, and a task that has defied all efforts to ‘go paperless’ over the years. Everything, and I mean everything, gets printed out, to be annotated, edited, checked and double checked. Companies no longer send us annual reports in the same way they used to – presumably the trees they save flatter their so-called ESG (environmental, social and governance) reporting. No matter, we just print them out. We are still sent many books – good ones make their way into our library, the rest pile up in various corners of the office, alongside the stacks of paper. The office Marie Kondos have even cast their eyes over our prized archive of magazines, stretching back to a time long before the internet existed.
Unsurprisingly, a resistance movement is taking shape – I will not name its ringleaders, but one of them bought me a book this week, Messy by the FT’s Undercover Economist Tim Harford. Its premise is simple – while as human beings we are naturally drawn towards order and tidiness, it is often messiness and disorder that leads to the creative leaps that drive the world forward. That is particularly true in the workplace and, to illustrate their point more fully, our ringleader bookmarked a particularly pertinent chapter with a photograph of a messy office belonging to none other than John Bogle, the legendary investor who died this month at the grand old age of 89. It is no understatement to say that Mr Bogle’s big idea, indexing, has fundamentally changed investing, and for the good, not least by shining a spotlight on the fees that enrich fund managers and impoverish their clients. And he got there from the madness of hot markets, corporate catastrophe, and by assiduously reading to work out how to make the industry work for all – leaving the evidence of that creative process cluttering his office.
No matter how hard we try, markets will always remain untidy places that cannot be easily compartmentalised or simplified. And tidiness does not help us make those unexpected connections that often prove the genesis of the best investment ideas like Mr Bogle’s. The world is messy – and the best investors know how to embrace that chaos.
