This week I watched a couple of episodes of popular TV series Suits about a corporate law firm in New York. In the first episode, managing partner of the firm Jessica Pearson is having breakfast with her mentor, complaining to him that Harvey Specter, a star lawyer, she recently promoted to senior partner, lacks compassion. 

“If he lacks compassion, throw it into his face” - was her mentor’s advice.

TV series rarely deliver accurate representation of reality (just think of Sex and the City), so don’t believe that Wall Street or City firms are any good at management and staff development. What really stuck with me is that if a typical law firm or an investment bank actually bothered to invest time in improving management skills of their employees, we’d be very likely to see less burn-outs, failed relationships, corporate fraud and other dire consequences than we do today. Compassion is not a quality ordinarily highlighted by HR directors, corporate coaches and senior managers, but how many of you wished your boss had better life skills?

I was not born with compassion in my bones. Growing up in the Soviet Union, we were taught to praise bravery, excellence, determination. I remember a classmate who really struggled at English classes at school despite working very hard and always doing her homework. It was not good enough. Hard work, effort weren’t particularly relevant in a country where its pioneering leader Vladimir Lenin taught himself to speak five foreign languages. I learnt competition not compassion and entered adulthood lacking this vital social skill.

Landing in London’s City, I need not have worried. Junior staff were treated like cogs in a soulless machine, made to work around the clock. Relations at work were described as meritocracy in a corporate brochure, but in reality strict hierarchy was in place. Everyone looked after his own interests. Help was not offered, what’s more, it was a shameful thing to solicit. A typical banker would donate hundreds of pounds to some remote cause of children dying in Africa, but he would deprive his juniors of sleep, life outside work and empathy.

Life has a way of teaching us its vital skills. In a corporate and then entrepreneurial world outside banking I’ve learned that we are all wired differently. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, taking time to understand what motivates others help to communicate and develop relationships at work and at home. Most recently, I had a humbling experience taking a friend for a walk in a wheelchair. I had no idea the pavements in London had so many bumps. The slightest incline made pushing quite strenuous. Crossing roads was a nightmare before I figured out how to get the wheelchair over the edge. There were many passers by, but only one person (an immigrant Polish builder) helped me to lift the chair over one of many edges I encountered. If Harvey Specter (feel free to substitute with an equivalent you know personally) spent just a day looking after another person, a toddler, perhaps or an elderly, someone with a speech impairment who nevertheless wants to make herself understood, then his work ethics would give room to some compassion. 

At the end of the day, no one wants to work for an a**ehole. 

People are funny about money, aren’t they? 

It’s not something we learn at school, at least not in a systematic way, so we develop our own quirks as we grow up and venture through life’s twists and turns. Granted, our attitude to money carries a certain genetic code: some folks are accused of being tight, some consider money talk a taboo, others love nothing else than displaying the catch of their latest spending spree.

My personal experience has been a colourful one. I grew up in a modestly middle class family, before my father started his own business, which allowed us, for a brief period of time, to taste how the other half lives. I started earning money at the age of 15, and I loved the freedom it allowed me. Any teenager would resonate with that. I lived on a tight budget as a student, waitressing my way through college, but I never felt unhappy. I was rich in my banking days, but time poor; I was spending money in flashy bursts, as if trying to warm myself up from the freeze of unhappiness. About five years ago I went travelling for a year, staying in dirt-cheap hostels but indulging myself in experiences as simple as eating steak in Argentina or as unforgettable as taking a boat to Antarctica. And now I live on a fraction of what I was earning just two years ago, but you’d probably not notice it. There is an art to fine-tuning your values, which makes it still possible to live within your means. 

Money is not something we talk about so I accept that some readers have repelled from their screens in horror. If you are still with me, allow me to share some recent experiences with you, which have inspired this article.

I recently met a young woman and invited her to attend my Ladies Who Impress event. She sent me an email asking whether 'non-profits' get a discount. This young lady does not run her own charity, she is employed by one, and if I were to speculate, she is probably paid well. Her question still troubles me, because whilst I admire people who work for non-profit organisations, it does not escape me that they do it by choice. Whether you are a nurse or a teacher, a corporate lawyer or a businesswoman, you have made a choice to earn less or more, to address your philanthropic values as priorities or to accentuate your status. If it’s meaningful work that you are after, if you want to do good and make the world a better place, it is your choice and it comes with certain sacrifices. Economists call it an opportunity cost (read more about it in the next newsletter), which means that when we choose to have more of A, we necessarily sacrifice some of B. The society we live in helps senior citizens, unemployed and families to make such sacrifices less painful (e.g. subsidised travel, arts and leisure); personally, I offer a discount to my events to under 21s. But is it reasonable to expect a restaurant, a theatre or any other establishment to foot a share of your bill because you are paid to do good?

Another funny thing about money is when people say “I can’t afford to”. Usually, the honest answer is “I don’t want to” or “my opportunity cost of going to an opera is going to a violin concerto and a play at the National, so given that my utility function is maximised through consumption of drama in the absence of musical score, I’d rather not, thank you.” Of course, I am not completely socially hopeless, so employ a more palatable way to decline an offer to go to the opera than the bland economic jargon. Nevertheless, I try to avoid “I can’t afford to” because so many people around jump into taxis, order takeaways, buy designer bags, subscribe to Sky, eat out several times a week, drink alcohol but remain blind to the choices they make. Someone recently complained to me about her household budget being affected by the increased costs of public transport in London (2.5% on average 2014/2015) after an affectionate speech about her recent shopping trip to Zadig & Voltaire. 

I grew up with a friend, who has always been effortlessly generous. As a child, it was her habit to share treats with me; as a young adult, she was always buying rounds of drinks at a bar; today her house is legendary for its hospitality. I am not naturally a giving person. Her generosity has always seemed remarkable to me. She said to me once: “Money? As long as we are well, we can always earn some.” It won’t surprise you, if I told you, that she has always been a happy person. 

Money is a medium of exchange. How do you spend yours? Can you buy a gesture of goodwill? Can you give validation to a friend? Can you back someone’s dream? Can you make someone smile? 

As always, I welcome your comments. 

“Our language (I mean the English) is degenerating very fast… I begin to fear that it will be impossible to check it.”

“The vocabularies of the majority of high-school pupils are amazingly small. I always try to use simple English, and yet I have talked to classes when quite a minority of the pupils did not comprehend more than half of what I said.”

“Recent graduates, including those with university degrees, seem to have no mastery of the language at all. They cannot construct a simple declarative sentence, either orally or in writing. They cannot spell common, everyday words. Punctuation is apparently no longer taught. Grammar is a complete mystery to almost all recent graduates."

Unless you’ve read the prologue to Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century or Famous Last Words: The American Language Crisis Reconsidered by Harvey A. Daniels, you’ll be surprised to learn that the quotes above date back to 1785, 1889 and 1961 respectively. 

As in the earlier centuries, nowadays we are worrying about the decline of the English language. The 21st century epidemic appears more alarming than ever before. Today’s electronic devices help us to spell, whilst our own spelling muscles waste away. Restricted character count on Twitter and short attention spans of social media consumption in general have changed written communication dramatically, reducing paragraphs to bullet points and sentences to mere headlines. We can just about taste the flavour of what is being fed to us, but there is no substance left in that pot. The new generation of media broadcasters with blogs, Twitter and Instagram accounts reason that the relevance of their content, the urgency of their news and the appeal of their photos make rudimentary orthographic values archaic and redundant. Will the vitality of the language, triumphing over concerns of the previous centuries, pull through once again? 

Whilst Alain de Botton, Malcolm Gladwell, Tim Harford and Gillian Tett (to name but a few virtuosos) are giving me hope that I won’t ever starve for a good read, I still get frequent indigestion from scanning through Facebook posts, noting captions underneath Instagram photos and skimming through some lifestyle blogs I follow. Some grammatical disasters I come across are so baffling, it is hard to believe their authors weren’t pulling pranks. A friend recently referred me to a blog post about “alot” and I laughed at the incredulity of it, until I came across that ‘creature’ in real life. It seems that some modern broadcasters are not just lazy about punctuation and ignorant about grammar, but they are consistently spending more time on editing a photo ("Valencia" or “Mayfair"?) then on checking the wording of their posts. What’s so disappointing is that their readers and followers are seemingly happy to lap up “its my new recipe” or “I could of made it myself” and swallow any number of typos, whilst admiring creativity, fashion sense or any other inspirational morsel chucked at them by their idol. 

As a conscientious user of the language, I do not get upset about our everyday vocabulary growing to include new, occasionally unappetising words, which reflect the dynamics of the English language. However unpalatable the latest additions to the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary are, I can live with and even use BYOD and bitcoin, abbreviate an “invitation" to an “invite” and put together “binge” and “watch”, as if the expression was there years before Netflix. I welcome experimenting with new ingredients, as long as we still pay homage to the fundamental structure and a sense of style.

In the end, grammar, punctuation and spelling send powerful signals about their authors. K. Wiens wrote an article “I won’t hire people who use poor grammar. Here’s why” for the Harvard Business Review Blog Network in July 2012. He said that he rejects job applications, filled with errors, because “if it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use it’s, then that’s not a learning curve I’m comfortable with.” In private setting, online dating profiles, full of spelling mistakes, are more off-putting than acne. I also find that if I receive a grammatically sloppy email, I feel a lack of respect. Everyone makes a typo now and again, especially with the treacherous auto-correct function at play, but one thing is certain: amidst the flood of hasty posts and publications, well-written and punctuated, grammatically correct prose stands out in style. "To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life’s greatest pleasures."