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Universal Music CEO David Joseph: Why I'm standing up for difference

One of the first things David Joseph, chairman and CEO of Universal Music in the UK, tells me about himself is that he is “a happily self-confessed introvert in an extrovert world”. He’s not kidding. In the journey from the revolving door at the company’s King’s Cross building to the lift ride up to his glass-and-girder office on the 10th floor, I’ve seen outfits not out of place at an art-school graduation show.

By geeky contrast, Joseph is in Converse and a soft-cotton shirt, and I am not sure he’s shaved.

His hands are in his pockets (I’ve been told he doesn’t like to shake hands), and I’m immediately aware of his shyness because of a slight tangling of his sentence as he greets me. Also, his laugh is nervous, like a cough.

I’m here to talk to him about neurodiversity, the umbrella term covering attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia and autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). More specifically, the research he’s commissioned into neurodiversity at work, which the company will publish in the autumn.

It’s a timely initiative. High-profile public figures are talking about their conditions, most recently Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate change activist who has been open about her Asperger’s and OCD. Musicians who have volunteered conditions include Billie Eilish, who has Tourette’s, Justin Timberlake, Solange Knowles, Adam Levine and will.i.am, who all have ADHD. Florence Welch has dyspraxia. Of course, the relationship between creativity and quirkiness has always been there. John Lennon and David Bowie were frequently called “hyperactive”.

Having worked in the music business most of his career, Joseph was always aware that it attracts unique thinkers — neurotypical or not. While he’s keen to point out that being “quiet” or “introverted” on its own does not make you neurodiverse — or “ND” as he calls it — it was a book he read on the Quiet Revolution that triggered in him a chain of thought on how those creatives he works with “really think”. Quiet by Susan Cain is about introverts who have changed history (he cites Rosa Parks of the Montgomery bus boycott).

We want artists to flourish and that means introducing new styles of working where people can discuss difference

David Joseph

“I’ve dealt with quite a few artists who’ve written things that have changed people’s lives, but you get a text from them and realise they’re dyslexic. When we started talking about this there was a general openness from those with dyspraxia and dyslexia. There are lots of them.”

Among creative friends, too, he realised there was a far higher incidence of diagnoses than in general. “About 15 per cent of the adult population has some form of neurodiversity,” he says. “So I was thinking about where I work, people I know, and then the statistics. That was the catalyst.” He won’t disclose the percentage of his employees who have diagnoses, “but I imagine we are closer to mid-20-30 per cent”.

Dyslexia affects 10 per cent of the population but, according to Forbes, it occurs in 25 per cent of CEOs, including Sir Richard Branson (Virgin) and Sir Charles Dunstone (Carphone Warehouse). “There’s a link between dyslexia and running stuff,” says Joseph.

Harvard Business Review, he continues, calls neurodiversity a “competitive advantage”, citing a number of companies “now seeking to build on the commercial potential of the differently abled”. I sense Joseph is keen to impress that being well informed on this issue makes business sense to Universal. He points to Google and the UK government intelligence agency GCHQ, which have specialist teams of “neurodiverse” employees for aspects of coding and code-cracking.

While applauding their initiative, Joseph doesn’t want neurodiverse employees working in silos at Universal. “Tech have teams on high-functioning parts of the spectrum to help with coding and technical stuff. We’re not like that. We are primarily a creative, enabling company,” he says. His thinking is this: if world-changing ideas come from those who think differently, why are creative companies in the UK not doing more to attract and accom-modate them?

“We want artists to flourish,” he says. “Our thoughts so far are that we don’t want to ‘other’ people — we want to integrate everybody everywhere so that they feel included and part of a team, as opposed to ‘he’s part of a team who just does that’.”

This has meant introducing a whole range of new styles of working, starting with making sure people can talk about their differences (and that bosses listen). There’s also discussion around flexible working hours — important in an industry where artists sometimes work through the night, or may struggle on a crowded Tube, or start at the crack of dawn. They already have summer hours (finishing at 1pm on Fridays) “as a reward for the extra time people spend on email and phone at home”.

And anyway, he adds: “We know that clear-thinking time away from the office helps solve problems. Do you think Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg sit in meetings all day?” He tells me about a company he won’t name where the boss will draw a vertical line with their finger, signalling “sit down” if any employee tries to leave before 6.30pm. “The suggestion is: you can’t go until I’m gone. What decade do they think we live in, the Thirties?”

Another area they are rethinking is recruitment. Given the numbers with dyslexia in the creative industries, he says, why force people to fill out forms? “They might be the most talented person in the organisation but not good at form-filling.” He suggests a video, or audio recording, or even a collage. Interviews can be recast as “a chat” with an accompanying photo of the room where it may take place.

Most important of all, perhaps, is that everyone in the 1,000-strong building is aware of “difference”. Joseph pauses and laughs. “Although here we are used to working with a wide range of personalities so it doesn’t feel like a leap. Anything goes. I’ve worked with lots of extroverts and lots of introverts. There’s no right or wrong. We’ll manage everyone. I don’t believe in trying to transform someone into something they’re not.”

People who were once thought “quirky” or “eccentric” or “stubborn” might now be better understood. In one employee’s words: “Don’t make assumptions. Don’t automatically expect people to chat about the football.” A “buddy” system helps new employees understand unwritten social rules, such as “by the way, it’s expected to make tea for your team”.

Joseph understands the magnitude of the subject and doesn’t want to get it wrong. His conversation is littered with caveats, and the company’s handbook has already been through revisions. But he accepts that “it will be page one of chapter one, the first reference point for things. From there it has to evolve. If this is the end of it we are really in trouble.”

In the industry Joseph already has a reputation for being unconventional. Under his reign Universal was the first company to pay its interns. During Mental Illness Awareness Week he ensured a card was placed on everyone’s desk with helpline numbers for stress and depression. The office is vast and light — the kind of place with a library for “quiet working” and free yoga classes.

When I ask one of his top team how he broached the subject of neurodiversity with her, she says he left a book on her desk entitled Wired to Create. Others got: How Non-Conformists Move the World and The Power of Different: The Link Between Disorder and Genius. “This is his style,” she says. “He’s subtle.”

Joseph, who has a twin brother called Jeremy, was raised in Southgate, which he cheerfully describes as “incredibly boring and suburban”. His father — a manager whose artists included Billy Ocean — was away on tour a lot but encouraged the boys to learn the sleeve notes of albums, which he would then test them on when he returned. “The only thing that really mattered to my mother was a roof over your head, even if there were four children living in one room.”

A team of four formidable aunties — “all socialists” — provided her with back-up, and his sprawling family, with tens of cousins, doubled as a social life. “There was no academic pressure, there was “value systems” pressure. Recently, one of my cousins — a Labour peer — came round and saw we had a new Mini. He looked at me and looked at the car and said: ‘Don’t forget where you came from’.”

Or how he got here. He still wears trainers, for instance, because going to a Jewish state school in Camden made him the target of skinheads in the late Seventies and early Eighties, “and occasionally a brick would come your way and you had to be able to run fast”.

Thereafter was an interregnum at LSE, where he studied developing-world geography, although he confesses he was briefly the lead singer of a band called Octidruple (“I don’t know what it was named after but it was crap. I did bad singing. It was like the worst possible version of Jamiroquai”), and from there he went via advertising into the record business, first RCA and then Polydor.

“Polydor had lots of artists signed to it: Scissor Sisters, Snow Patrol. Then we took on Interscope, our American label, and a big transformation happened when Eminem was signed to us. It was the start of a whole massive change of culture. I was around at the birth of all that. Eminem led to [Dr] Dre and Gaga, and lots of amazing things happened.” The company is still going through “incredible growth”.

Joseph hopes the pioneering work on neurodiversity they’ve done will eventually filter down to schools — still hugely behind. “We had education days for the whole company. As a result, people were coming forward and saying, ‘Hey, I had this at school.’ Particularly in music. We discovered that people who indexed [excelled] in auditory listening may under-index in the written word. So they may have found reading difficult, whereas they may have been off the charts on understanding music and conversations.”

But he also cautions that “while many hugely creative people are ND, it doesn’t automatically follow that everyone with ND will be hugely creative”. There are plenty who struggle with their condition and do not consider it a superpower at all.

“Overall there is a simple economic argument for this. The UK is amazing at creativity, from Adele to Harry Potter to everything. So if it leads to employment and a growth sector, double, triple down on the creative sector. And if you start embracing creativity, by definition you are embracing neurodiversity, because it’s all interconnected.”

@chedwardes