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How much fun do you usually have in your time away from work?
I asked myself this question the other day when I met a British scientist named William Donald. He is an Associate Professor of Career Development and Human Resource Management at the University of Southampton and had a brainwave in 2022. What if he could publish a paper with another academic whose last name was Duck, so that anyone citing their research had to say it was Donald and Duck?
I’d like to say there was a serious reason for this idea, but when I called Donald he said he did it mainly because “I thought it would be a bit of fun.”
Unfortunately, finding the Duck cooperative turned out to be difficult. Donald spent 18 months contacting potential co-authors through LinkedIn before finding Nicholas Duck, an organizational psychologist from Australia who runs the productivity consultancy Opposite.
Unlike some of the other candidates, Duck didn’t find Donald’s proposal offensive or ridiculous. “I like to shake things up and not take things too seriously,” he told me last week. He said that Donald’s idea was good for him.
Because the pair shared interests in the workplace, they decided to write a paper on what they called the Donald Duck phenomenon, or the unconventional reasons that drive scientists to publish. These included taking revenge on a rival; cooperation with the hero; desire to contribute to the cause and simple fun.
The result is a slim piece of just three pages—five including references and notes—which was, surprisingly, published last month in the GiLE Journal of Skills Development. This is a relatively new open access publication that nevertheless claims to use a “robust” peer review process.
Despite all this, the paper does not add a huge amount to the sum of human knowledge. It is perhaps condescending and childish. But it’s also a joy, and I wish there were more such nonsense.
It’s not just that these things make a large chunk of life spent at work more tolerable. There is good reason to be happy at work as governments across Europe worry about a post-pandemic drop in average working hours, which they blame for making economies weaker and less competitive.
Obviously, jokes alone don’t do the trick. But it is telling to consider how rarely you can hear about playfulness at work today.
It’s been 17 years since Steve Jobs took the stage in San Francisco to unveil a new Apple gadget called the iPhone and dialed the number of a nearby Starbucks to order “4,000 lattes to go, please.” He immediately said, “Wrong number” and hung up. But the store was still receiving orders for that much coffee from Apple fans years later, which baffled managers.
Chief executive capers, however, are thin on the ground. I was surprised recently to read that Jane Fraser, the chief executive of Citigroup, is a serial prankster with a long history of pulling pranks on colleagues.
In 2022, she asked her senior team to sign a parachute waiver, the Wall Street Journal reported, and left them to agonize over the prospect of the bank’s executives all risking death together, before emailing again to say: April 1.
Another time, she reportedly stole a teddy bear she had once given to a cost-cutting executive, taped its paws shut and told the man to take it easy on the cuts or the bear would get them.
News of the fun may hit some quarters at Citi, where Fraser is overseeing massive job losses. Even jokes with academic quotes can misfire.
In the 1940s, physicist George Gamow decided it would be fun to add the name of his distinguished friend, Hans Bethe, to a paper that Gamow and his student Ralf Alfer had written on the origin of the universe.
This had the wonderful effect of creating the article Alpher, Bethe and Gamma, a pun on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha-beta-gamma. But Alpher was reportedly angered, fearing his contribution would be diminished by the addition of the prominent Beth’s name.
You can see his point. Jokes at work should be deployed skillfully and carefully. Still, the best ones are glorious, and the working world would be a much better place if there were a lot more of them.
pilita.clark@ft.com