№ 09The Faculty
Priya Ramanathan.
Behavioural Scientist and Author, Independent.
On attention as a professional discipline.
Attention is the senior resource of modern professional life. It is mismanaged because nobody is paid to manage it.
The work
Priya writes a book about every four years and a small private newsletter for about fifty senior operators in between. The newsletter is two thousand words an issue, eight issues a year, and the renewal rate is, as far as she can tell, one hundred per cent. She takes about ten paid talks a year, almost all of them private gatherings rather than public conferences, and gives the proceeds to a small reading charity in east London she will not name. She speaks at our October conference each year and runs the Speakers Lounge at the end of the day.
Background
She trained as a behavioural scientist at Bombay and Cambridge and spent six years inside two large advisory firms, mostly in their internal research groups. She left consulting in 2016 for reasons she will give, if asked directly, in a single sentence: she wanted to read more and present less. She has been independent since.
She published her first book in 2018, on attention as an organisational resource. It sold about twelve thousand copies, was translated into four languages, and won an unfussy industry prize she keeps on a shelf in her study. The second book is in proof at the time of writing. The third has a working title that she is not yet willing to put in print.
Signature contribution
Priya is known for the structural argument that attention is the senior resource of modern professional life, and that it is mis-managed in most organisations because nobody has been given the brief of managing it. Her thesis, which is more uncomfortable than it sounds, is that an organisation without a sense of where its attention is going is an organisation that is, in effect, being run by whoever is best at interrupting the chief executive.
She is also known for a particular discipline of her own: a four-hour reading block every morning that she has kept, with three exceptions, since 2017. She will tell the operators she advises that they cannot do their job properly without a similar block. Most try to argue with her about the four hours. She does not argue back.
In practice
Walk into Priya’s small study in north London at half past nine on any weekday and you will find her reading a printed paper, by hand, with a pencil. She is not at her email. She is not on a call. She will be at her email at noon and on a call after lunch. The four hours are sacred, and they are the source of everything in the newsletter, the books, and the talks. The operators she advises are taught, eventually, to recognise that the work is the reading.
If your day has fewer than three hours of uninterrupted reading in it, you are not doing senior work. You are doing senior administration.
Outside the work
She lives in Stoke Newington with a partner who is a textile historian and a daughter who is studying engineering at York. She walks the Lea every day. She reads novels in long winters and nonfiction in long summers. She has never, by her own count, kept a New Year resolution about email.
The organisation that does not protect its chief executive’s mornings is, in practice, run by whoever sends the loudest email.