‘If you work hard and succeed, you’re a loser’: can you really wing it to the top?

Forget the spreadsheets and make it up as you go along - that's the message of leaders from Elon Musk to Boris Johnson. But is acting on instinct really a good idea?

There are, it seems, two types of winging it" stories. First, there are the triumphant ones - the victories pulled, cheekily, improbably, from the jaws of defeat. Like the time a historian (who prefers to remain nameless) turned up to give a talk on one subject, only to discover her hosts were expecting, and had advertised, another. I wrote the full thing - an hour-long show - in 10 panicked minutes," she says. At the end, a lady came up to congratulate me on how spontaneous my delivery was."

Then there is the other kind of winging it story - the kind that ends in ignominy. Remember the safeguarding minister, Rachel Maclean, tying herself in factually inaccurate knots when asked about stop-and-search powers? The Australian journalist Matt Doran, who interviewed Adele without listening to her album? Or the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, claiming Channel 4 was publicly funded, then that Channel 5 had been privatised?