To succeed in any competitive field, you must be driven, obsessive and hardworking

THE OTHER night, I asked my youngest child what he thought about his new secondary school. He considered the matter and said: “It’s not very chilled.”

At first I thought it comic that he expected this expensive, traditional school to be chilled and judged it a failure for not being so. I pointed out that I wasn’t spending £15,000 (€16,500) a year for him to learn how to chill, as he appeared to have picked that up already. He looked at me with a puzzled smile.

But then I stopped thinking it was funny. How could I have allowed him to reach almost 12 years of age without knowing this most vital fact of life? That chilling – or “chillaxing” as he even more annoyingly calls it – should not be the first thing one does, but the last. Only when one has done everything else, like finding one’s shin pads and learning one’s Latin vocab, is it time to take it easy.

Yet chilling – or vegetating, as I prefer to call it – is now seen by children as the natural order of things.

Many of them (boys in particular) still expect life to be chilled in the workplace. This is much more of a risk to employers than the other things they berate school leavers for – like an inability to spell or add.

Last week, I read that City bankers were being encouraged to go into local schools to teach young kids “employability” and “school leadership”.

I have no idea what these are, but I hope they amount to drilling pupils in anti-chillaxing measures.

Bankers should be attempting what parents like me have manifestly failed to teach their children: that chillaxing is neither cool nor virtuous. The lesson is simple and catchy: to make money, forget chill, and go for skill and will instead.

This staggeringly obvious lesson is considered pretty daring in management circles. When Robert Rosen recently published Just Enough Anxiety, which argued that pressure is vital to success, everyone gasped in amazement.

But it is clearly true: even though to be chilled might be very Zen, it does not lead to success. To succeed in corporate life – or in any competitive field – one must be driven, obsessive and hardworking.

To see whether there were any exceptions to this rule, I typed “chilled CEO” into Google. All I could find was the chief executive of a company called Chill International, announcing the launch of a new menopausal cooling towel – which wasn’t really what I was looking for.

Given that chillaxing inexorably leads to failure, it is important to establish where it comes from. I suspect it’s a mixture of nature and nurture: some babies are born more chilled than others, and unless subjected to the anti-chill drill, tend not to snap out of it.

If one divides the working population into the chilled and non-chilled, interesting patterns emerge. The young are more chilled than the old, and southern Europeans more chilled than northern.

Last week, I spent two days at a board meeting in Spain. Over one late dinner, the Spanish were still calling for more dishes at midnight and looking increasingly relaxed, while the British were becoming increasingly agitated. It made me wonder whether the chill factor was more of a barrier to different nationalities working well together than the language one.

Even more interestingly, whatever position people occupy on the chilled/unchilled spectrum, they are inclined to regard those on either side as deficient. I am deeply unchilled, both by disposition and by choice; I regard anyone more relaxed than I am as lazy, passive and sloppy, and those few who are (even) less relaxed as uptight and obsessive.

When I joined the Financial Timesmany years ago, I sat next to a woman who was spectacularly unchilled. Though I quite liked her as a person, as a colleague I found her neurotic, controlling and overly ambitious. One day we went for a drink and she said she envied me for being "so happy just to bumble along". In other words, she didn't envy my chill in the slightest; she thought me a fool and a failure in the making.

The chill factor is one area where diversity does not work: it is best to work with people who have a similar appetite for chillaxing. In my time, I have had relatively chilled bosses, who left me feeling angsty and undermanaged, and profoundly unchilled ones, who left me feeling harassed and persecuted.

Just as it is hard to work with people with a different chill factor, it is painful doing work that requires more or less chill than one is accustomed to. In last week’s board meeting, there was a long discussion on the Walker report’s likely recommendations for corporate risk registers that made me suddenly feel a pang of sympathy for my son. I knew the discussion was important and that I must pay attention. But inside, a little voice was complaining: this isn’t very chilled.

As I write, I’m aware of a towering counter-example to the theory. Barack “no drama” Obama has the most powerful job in the world but also seems pretty chilled. Yet I am prepared to bet my own house that Obama didn’t get to the White House by chillaxing.

He has pulled off the ultimate trick: to be driven and look relaxed. He is a dangerous example to the young. When they see Obama on the TV they should be told: don’t try this at home. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009)