Karina Robinson is the chief executive of Robinson Hambro, a chief executive advisory and search firm.
I was the worst Spanish equities analyst in the City of London. In 1987, my boss at Morgan Grenfell fired me from my first job after 15 months. He could tell from the back of my neck, he said, that I hated the job.
My boss was almost right. It wasn’t just my neck that railed against the role: I hated it with every bone in my body. Yet I have subsequently had a 35-year career in the City and financial journalism, including being a political and economic correspondent at Bloomberg, a senior editor at The Banker, and Master of the Worshipful Company of International Bankers, a City livery company. Over the past decade, I’ve run my own boutique advisory and search firm, Robinson Hambro, along with other advisory board roles.
But this litany of positions hides a (shameful) secret: I scraped through my maths O level, a UK public exam, with a mediocre “C” grade — much to the bemusement of my maths teacher who anticipated a fail. As for physics, the situation is doubly ironic: I gave it up aged 14, yet have founded The City Quantum Summit, a conference bringing together the scientific and financial communities.
Nor am I alone: I was much reassured to hear that Sir Robert Stheeman, chief executive of the Debt Management Office, which issues UK Treasury bonds, failed his maths O level. Twice.
My experience offers, I hope, some lessons for students in their last years of school and university who are being pressured into studies that are not in tune with their souls. You do not need to be a maths genius, a computer scientist, a PhD in physics or, indeed, an expert in any Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects to succeed in the financial or tech sectors.
If you aren’t gifted in that way, enjoy every minute studying medieval literature or international relations. For you too might be “a dragoman” — a word I learned when reading Anna Aslanyan’s book, Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History, and which describes the unifying thread in my career.
A dragoman was a translator in the Ottoman Empire whose power far exceeded that of…
