International Witsies

MICHAEL SKAPINKER

BY HEATHER DUGMORE

“The mid-1970s at Wits was a fascinating time to be a student; there was a high level of political foment with a lot of protests and activism on campus. My activism was very much on the journalistic side, writing for Wits Student. It was a great training ground, and it is pretty much thanks to Wits that I have been in journalism for 40 years.”

For 34 of these years, Michael (BA 1977) has held various positions at the Financial Times (FT) in London, including contributing editor and columnist, and leadership and management development educator for the FT’s education arm, Headspring. This has taken him around the world, leading and chairing programmes for global companies and banks.

Revisiting his Wits days, Michael recalls the excitement of the Wits Student newsroom, with Dr Irwin Manoim (BA 1976, BA Hons 1977, MA 1986, PhD 2013) as the editor. “He is one of the great South African journalists. Even as a student he understood journalism and was a real newspaperman who taught me how to write and edit.

“I loved journalism; even as a child I was a newspaper nut and would read The Star and Rand Daily Mail from cover to cover – it had a huge influence on my life. The headline that made the biggest impression on me as a child was about JF Kennedy’s assassination. It said ‘Kennedy Shot Dead’ and I could not believe the sheer size of the headline.”

Growing up in apartheid South Africa and studying at Wits, he says, two things especially were instilled in him: a devotion to the rule of law and telling the truth in journalism.

From Wits he went to Cambridge University to study law: “It was a very privileged education but it lacked the intellectual and political excitement of being at Wits,” says Michael. “What it did have was a wonderful internationalism and I gained insights from people from all over the world, which was very formative.”

After Cambridge, it was time to travel wand his wife-to-be Gillian Lazar (BA 1979; BA Hons 1980), whom he met at Wits, came over to the UK to travel with him. They are still married and Gillian, who has a PhD in applied linguistics, is a senior lecturer at Middlesex University.

They landed up in Athens, working as English teachers. After the first year there Michael went to every foreign press association in the city looking for work as a journalist. His luck turned when he knocked on the door of Paul Anastasiades, who was the correspondent for the New York Times and the London Daily Telegraph.

“He said ‘is that a South African accent?’, and told me he needed a stringer for the Argus group of newspapers in South Africa. His terms were that I could have a desk in his office and that I would be paid 11 pounds per article, of which I could keep seven. The job grew from there and I started freelancing for the Financial Mail in South Africa, and became a broadcast journalist for CBS in the US and Independent Radio News in London, reporting from Greece, Turkey and Cyprus.”

In 1984 Michael and Gillian returned to the UK and he did a stint in trade journalism. “My dream was to work on the FT. There was something deeply truthful about its culture and journalism that appealed to me, so I applied. They turned me down twice but on my third attempt in 1986 I was offered a job to write about management. I walked through the FT’s doors and I said to myself: ‘I never want to be anywhere else’.

“The wonderful thing about the newspaper is they expect you to change jobs every four years to reinvent yourself. Over the past 35 years I’ve been the editor of different sections of the paper and written about everything from management to the aircraft industry, as well as writing columns.”

In all of the 35 countries he has visited he has taken long walks, which he also does in London, walking an average of 10km a day. Three places that particularly fascinate him are Brazil – in particular São Paulo – Singapore and Hong Kong.

“São Paulo is Johannesburg’s sister city. I have never seen two cities that are so alike, from the excitement and vibrancy to the jacaranda trees,” he explains. “Brazil, in general, has a lot in common with South Africa, including the huge differences in wealth, and the traumatic past.

“Singapore fascinates me because it transformed itself from a very poor country to one of the richest in the world with a very high standard of living, excellent education and the best food I’ve ever eaten. It has all the trappings of democracy but not much freedom. Criticism of the government is not easily tolerated. The press is very strictly controlled and toes the government line. The population is majority Chinese but also Indian and Malay and there are quotas for the number of ethnic groups living together to enforce social cohesion.”

To take him back to Singapore’s cuisine, he frequents a restaurant in London called Singapore Garden. “It has white tablecloths and wonderfully rude Singaporean waiters.”

Hong Kong was an annual destination for Michael to chair a conference on innovation in the law. He loved being there and is deeply concerned by how its rule of law and freedoms are being suppressed.

What encourages him about South Africa is that the judiciary has remained resolutely independent.

Michael’s business travel came to an abrupt end at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. “Days of business travel to do a one hour speech in Frankfurt or Amsterdam are not going to happen anymore,” he says. “Some think it should never restart; we can talk on Zoom,” he wrote in a column earlier this year. “There is also an upside in that we can reach far wider audiences.

“Most agree that when it does restart, there will be less of it. Companies will want to save money; flying damages the environment. I don’t contest either. But if we stop visiting each other, we will, in important ways, be diminished. Travel not only broadens the mind, it deepens understanding – business travel most of all. Interactions on a work trip, unlike those on holiday, are not just with those serving you. You deal with people as equals. You go into their workplaces, you talk about what they are making and doing, you enter their lives.”

For well over a year during the pandemic Michael worked from his home office in North London. The FT is a 24hour operation in London, Hong Kong and New York and there were days when the newspaper and website were produced without one person in any of these offices.

The first people who wanted to return to the office were the younger staff – “living in shared accommodation, with four flatmates working at the kitchen table.”

Michael loves London, his home of 40 years: “One of the things I like most about this city is it has managed to combine a huge sprawling metropolis with vast amounts of free green space to explore. I love Highgate Wood and Hampstead Heath where I swim in the open ponds with seagulls, herons and ducks.

“I also love London for how international it is. It has always been a city of immigration; it’s what makes it a great global trading nation and world city, and I find this endlessly stimulating, which is part of why I was very strongly opposed to Brexit.”

And while the world tries to sort itself out, Michael seeks solace in London’s trees. In a column he wrote recently he says: “However bad things are, the trees have towered over worse. Their gnarled trunks, their knobbly longevity, are proof that whatever is troubling us will one day be a memory, that this too will pass. In the meantime, whether shading us with summer greenery, carpeting our way with cast-off autumn leaves or standing bare and bleak as we drudge through winter mud, they just don’t care.

As Marianne Dashwood in Jane Austen’s "Sense and Sensibility" says to the trees around Norland, the family home, just before she is forced to depart from it: ‘You will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your shade.’”

When professionals are promoted

One of the programmes Michael leads and moderates is for professional specialists entering management roles for the first time.

“When I was appointed as editor of the weekend FT and of the specialist supplements I initially found it very difficult suddenly being a manager. I became interested in the transition of professionals to managers. “Suddenly you have no friends in the office because you are in charge of their promotions, prospects and salaries. I talk about what an enormous transition this is, and the kind of things you deal with, the loneliness and the importance of finding mentors to support you and of strictly enforcing family and leisure time as you are no good to either if you burn yourself out.”

He pursues the topic in a column he wrote titled How to deal with your team members’ personal crises: “I always get a smile of recognition when I ask: before you became a manager, did you realise that so many things happened to people?

“Employees not only have their own problems; they have their extended families’ problems, too. … The problems are often serious and usually confidential. Give them time off, or suggest they work from home or get someone to step in for them. If you treat people well, they will treat you well in return; you get their loyalty back one hundred fold.”