Serious people

Office anthropology™

You know it.

The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology

Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

I love you, but you are not serious people.
Logan Roy, Succession.

As we approach the tenth anniversary of the great delamination, it seems, quietly, that the epic shortage of “serious people” that characterised its first decade seems — somewhat? — to be fading out.

I

I know, I know: a smartarse who makes up cod Shakespeare and bellyaches about the I.S.D.A. is hardly one to be throwing stones about a lack of gravitas — but nor does he ostend to be serious. There is a role for someone to be the clown: it just isn’t the same as Prime Minister.

You need someone, after all, to blow raspberries and debag those insufficiently serious people that grift their way to the upper echelons of international finance.