How illness puts a face on unknown chief executives

I’M VERY interested in that bloke at Lloyds taking time off for exhaustion. Quite a few people were interested in the news that Antonio Horta-Osorio, the chief executive of the Lloyds Banking Group, was off on medical leave. Last week, Lloyds’ shares closed 19 per cent down on where they’d been before the announcement.

The health of chief executives is becoming news. In fact, it seems pretty well everyone’s health is becoming news – see the best headline of last week: “Andy Williams has bladder cancer.” However, we do seem particularly obsessed with the health of millionaire businessmen. This is partly because of the whole Steve Jobs-as-saint kerfuffle. But it is also because for many of us, not least for many of us in the journalism community, news bulletins about chief executives’ health crises are the one part of the business pages that we understand.

Strange questions do tend to strike your business cretin. For example, how come all the Greek business experts on the radio are female? Also, why do no business correspondents write or broadcast down to the level of the business cretin? We have to wait for the consumer journalism before we can begin to understand business stuff. Yet we’ve got money too, you know. Or used to.

Where was I? Oh yes, the chief executive’s health as news item. The good thing about it is that even if you are a business cretin who spends more time reading Unislim magazine – and there’s a tough “shape up for Christmas” campaign in train at the moment – than you do reading the financial pages, you can still get in on the water-cooler conversation about the destructive effects of executive stress.

“Your health is your wealth” is a lovely motto, which used to be rehearsed by elderly and modest people on the State pension who were trembling on the demographic slope to being horribly abused and neglected by the nation’s health service. “Your health is your wealth” was the poor person’s revenge. But now everyone is saying it, particularly when hearing news about executive health problems.

Comforting myths are not just the preserve of the old poor, or even of the new poor. Legend has it that in the macho world of banking, any admission of weakness is bad for business. Thus, Steve Jobs was admired for the courage he demonstrated when he was dying of pancreatic cancer, and rather criticised for exploring alternative therapies, a move which has been condemned as a bad investment, although there has been no real proof presented that it was. Surely all that fuss about the alternative therapies was just the doctors getting worried that Steve Jobs would influence us lesser mortals to question their advice about how to handle terminal diseases.

Antonio Horta-Osorio, on the other hand, has hit the boardroom carpet due to physical and mental exhaustion which, as even we arts graduates know, is only a pay cut away from stress. Stress is the “S” word. In the business world it is a terminal disease. No executive wants to be known as someone who succumbs to stress. Last week, it was reported in all seriousness – and possibly on the insistence of Lloyds’ public relations company – that Antonio Horta-Osorio routinely goes scuba-diving with great white sharks. That’s how tough he is, you see.

We laugh at celebrities popping in and out of rehab – oh yes, we’re a lovely lot, the general public – but actually it seems a lot more logical to acknowledge frailty than to try to hide it. If we’re going to personalise the efficient running of major banks to the point that we are receiving health reports on their chief executives, then surely it’s kind of terrifying to think that our financial institutions are run by people who cannot admit to exhaustion or fear.

Antonio Horta-Osorio has been working seven-day weeks since last Christmas. According to yesterday's Sunday Times, when he moved to Lloyds he brought some executives with him from his old bank, Santander, and they had to work seven days a week as well.

Even though they weren’t earning £8.3 million a year, as he was. I mean is.

I think I speak for business cretins everywhere when I say that, in the old pre-crash days, we would have preferred our chief executives to keep taking the cocaine and let us know when they had finished making themselves and everybody else a fortune. (Not Mr Horta-Osorio, of course, who barely drinks alcohol). But now we feel slightly differently. We don’t mind if the chief executives get exhausted, or physically ill, as long as they let us know about it. We don’t want them sneaking about the place, being silent.

Which brings us back to our beloved motherland, and the fact that our chief executives seem remarkably quiet. And also remarkably healthy, for which of course one can only be grateful.

But this great media personalisation of the chief executive seems to have passed the Irish financial community, such as it is, right by. The only business executives we can readily identify, even by name, for very different reasons, are Michael O’Leary and David Drumm. We only pass the rest of them, all unwittingly, in traffic jams. Perhaps it is for the best.