Skyscrapers, bubbles and insecure overachievers - my highlights of 2017

With one foot still in the old year, and an eye to new opportunities in 2018, it seems the right moment to look back at the pieces I've most enjoyed working on in 2017.

Emma Jacobs, Charlie Bibby and I explored the secret life of a skyscraper with our multimedia inquiry into the people who work at London's Shard early in the year.

My favourite assignment was a trip to the French heartland to interview workers at Michelin's factory in Le Puy-en-Velay about the tyremaker's experiment in granting more responsibility to frontline employees (great photos by Leo Novel).

I enjoyed two quite different Lunches with the FT, hosting Jim Collins, the management writer and inveterate measures of his own achievements , and the cricket-mad chief executive of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, who chose to lunch at the home of the game, Lord's cricket ground:

For my weekly FT column, Uber was a constant supplier of material, including this column about how its rotten culture is bound to have spread to imitators.

I also tried to prick the latest tech bubble - with reference to manias past, from South Sea to dotcom - after Long Island Iced Tea announced an extraordinary "pivot" from beverages to blockchain in December.

There's no question about my biggest hit of the year, though. Readers swarmed in their tens of thousands to my column about insecure overachievers, based on academic Laura Empson's book on managing professionals. Our internal data showed it was read in nearly every country in the world, with the exception of Greenland and North Korea. Clearly, FT readers found plenty to identify with.

Here's wishing you all an overachieving 2018.

(Some of these articles fall behind the FT paywall. I have a limited number of "gift" links to offer to those who contact me - first come, first served.)