When I first spot Arianna Huffington, a young aide is standing beside her holding a pen flashlight so that the boss can make notes in a darkened room. Huffington is fine-tuning her speech for the Discovery Leadership Summit in Johannesburg, about sleep (good) and smartphones (not so good). Sleep is her new business. It seems quite a leap from building the Huffington Post media company, and yet there’s a pattern here. Huffington’s gift is for spotting the zeitgeist, then monetising it.
The moment she opens her mouth, her Greek accent startles you. You’d never guess that it’s half a century since the 16-year-old raised in a small Athenian flat arrived in England. (She later upgraded to the US.) The accent, she tells the conference, “has been the bane of my existence, until one day I met Henry Kissinger and he said, ‘You can never underestimate the effect in American public life of complete and utter incomprehensibility.’”
Yet when we sit down later — and after I have fended off her charming attempt to talk about me instead of her — Huffington explains that being Greek is a business asset. “Maybe being an outsider, I’m comfortable disrupting conventional ways of being. I don’t have any allegiance to the current way of doing things.”