Here is how it goes: a successful woman writes a book about being a successful woman and then other women write angry articles about her and it.
So I’ve been duly leafing through Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In trying to find material for my own angry column, only I can’t find anything to feel angry about – or to feel anything about at all. I was about to give up when I stumbled on a fact in an interview the author gave to The Times. It has nothing to do with women or success or leaning in or leaning back or even staying vertical. It’s that Mark Zuckerberg likes to keep the conference room at Facebook at a chilly 15C.
Now here is something I can really get steamed up about. This single fact hints at all sorts of things about the way we work now. It tells us about the Young Turks of Silicon Valley. It tells us about men and women. It tells us about productivity and the lack of it. But, most fundamentally of all, it raises the question: what is the right temperature to work in? You would think that this was something easy to get right. Yet there is a mysterious law that says offices are invariably the wrong temperature: scorchingly hot in the winter, and arctic in the summer.