Lucy Kellaway: Why pessimism is good for business
What role does negative thinking have to play in the corporate world? A crucial one, says Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times.
In business, optimism is good and pessimism bad. Optimists have a monopoly on success, on happiness and even on longevity.
Pessimists, with their long faces and dark thoughts are pariahs, thought fit for nothing in the gung-ho corporate world except possibly careers in journalism (where bad news is good news).
But now pessimism may be coming back to the mainstream. The turn came recently when management guru Tom Peters tweeted enthusiastically about a book that extols negative thinking.
This is an extraordinary turnaround for a man whose logo is a colourful exclamation mark and who for decades has been relentlessly, exhaustingly upbeat.
Unlike Mr Peters, I was born pessimistic. I expect a sudden downpour to spoil every summer party; I am confident that every initiative will end in failure; at least half the dresses in my wardrobe are grey.
Prepared for the worst
So I've dashed to look up the book Mr Peters recommends, which turns out to have a brainlessly upbeat title, The Positive Power of Negative Thinking: Use Defensive Pessimism to Harness Anxiety & Perform at Your Peak.
Still, Rome wasn't destroyed in a day, and perhaps this book has softened up the market for negativity sufficiently to prepare it for the book I'd like to write myself (if Mr Peters doesn't get there first).
I might call it, Pear-shaped: Why Things Always Go Wrong at Work, and How Not to Cope When They Do.
The trouble with optimists is that they don't do well in a pear-shaped world.
In prisoner of war camps in Vietnam, the people who died first were the positive thinkers - they fully expected to be back home by Christmas and fell to pieces when they weren't.
Admittedly, the world of business isn't exactly like a prisoner of war camp, in that you can nip out for a latte and you can sleep in your own comfy bed at night.
But it can be grim and relentless and one bad thing can happen after another and being always prepared for the worst seems to me the only wise course of action.
Woody Allen put it best: "Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem."
Prisoners of positivity
Despite the pessimism revival it is stupid to argue about which view of the world is best, when both views are clearly needed all of the time.
Every organisation and every partnership should be carefully balanced to include both optimists and pessimists.
A marriage also needs both - my own experience has taught me that it's good to have an optimist to come up with endless wild schemes for picnics and outings and a pessimist to swash the maddest ones and temper the rest with paracetamol and umbrellas.
Businesses need both even more to have just the right mix of daring and caution.
Diversity of optimists and pessimists is the most important sort of diversity there is and should be actively sought at board level and every level below.
Corporate pessimists should be de-stigmatised and beckoned out of the closet. Above all, they should stop having to pretend to see the glass half full just to suit the fashion.
They should be proud to declare that for them, it has been half empty all along.