Emma Jacobs

No one likes to admit it — but life’s lottery has a big role to play in success

Executives who spend their career at one place can boost morale and loyalty but risk stifling innovation

Isabel Berwick talks to Charter editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney and the FT’s Emma Jacobs

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

Demands for workers to return full time have a rose tinted view of in-person work

Our systems for figuring out childcare have not caught up with an egalitarian society

Chef wants to improve support for staff after recovering from extreme highs that caused insomnia and hallucinations

At 91, Alf Dubs has two measures guiding his decision to continue as a Labour peer in the UK’s House of Lords. The first is personal: can he make a contribution, particularly on refugee issues, an area he has some expertise on, not least because in 1939 he fled Czechoslovakia on Kindertransport to arrive in Britain. The second is whether family and colleagues think he has the mental fitness. If there’s any sign he “is losing it,” they are to “please, please tell me”, he says. The former MP does…

When Beth Behrendt’s three children were young, she communicated with her husband by email or by leaving notes on the kitchen counter on Wednesdays and Saturdays. “We didn’t talk very much,” she says. Such terse, practical exchanges marked the start of their divorce while also settling into birdnesting — a living arrangement whereby the children remain in the family home with one parent typically for half the week, before the other parent swaps in. It was cheaper than setting up “two households…

Could you spend 378 days and nights in a darkened space, illuminated only by strip lighting and a window looking out on a fake planet, with just three colleagues for company? A week? OK, a night? The four members of Nasa’s first Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (Chapea) mission lasted the full stretch, finally reappearing last week. They had spent more than a year in a Houston hangar, simulating a mission to Mars. The crew’s primary focus was not how to maintain equipment and phys…