Fans of The Crown will soon have the opportunity to own a piece of the royal drama as Bonhams is auctioning off a range of items from the Netflix series, which ended its six-season run in December.

More than 300 lots are currently available for online bidding through Feb. 8, and an additional 160 will go under the hammer during a live sale at Bonhams’ London headquarters on Feb. 7.

Since its debut in late 2016, The Crown has captivated viewers around the world with its visually stunning approach and dramatic portrayal of the British royal family’s tales of heartbreak. Throughout the show’s 60 episodes, viewers followed the twists and turns of the royals.

“The iconic costumes, props, and set pieces from The Crown are extensively researched and made with truly impressive attention to detail by master craftspeople,” Charlie Thomas, Bonhams U.K. group director for house sales and private and iconic collections, said in a statement. “Not only is this an incredible opportunity to own pieces from the landmark show, it is also the closest anyone can come to owning the real thing—be it the facade of 10 Downing Street or Princess Diana’s engagement ring.”

Highlights of the auction include recreations of Princess Diana’s iconic items, such as the sapphire engagement ring that actress Emma Corrin debuted as Diana in season 4 (presale estimate: £2,000 (US$2,537) to £3,000); the revenge dress actress Elizabeth Debicki wore as Diana during her split from then-Prince Charles in season 5 (estimate: £8,000 to £12,000); and the leopard swimsuit Debicki sported in season 6 while on vacation during Charles’ 50th birthday party for then-Camilla Parker Bowles (estimate: £800 to £1,000).

Expected to fetch the highest prices are a pair of life-size replicas from the set: the Gold State Coach, which is estimated to sell for between £30,000 and £50,000, and a facade of 10 Downing Street, the British prime minister’s office and residence (estimate: £20,000 to £30,000).

Described by Bonhams as a “rococo masterpiece,” the actual royal coach was built in 1762 for King George III and has been used at every coronation since 1831, when King William IV succeeded to the throne.

“We wanted to make something special, and Netflix had the money, ambition, and ability to go the whole hog. The Gold State Coach is fabulous,” said Andy Harries, CEO Left Bank Pictures and executive producer of The Crown, in the auction notes.

Gene D’Cruze, the series’ head of construction, said the items for sale are among the most impressive and accurate recreations ever committed to film.

“I’ve built every single set on every series—more than 1,000 of them—and employed 140 people. It’s all done old-school. I’ve done 80 TV series, but The Crown is the best—best production, best art department, best locations, best series, best people,” said D’Cruze in the auction notes. “I especially love the 10 Downing Street facade. Most sets only last six months, but this stood for seven years.”

Proceeds from the live auction will go toward establishing a new scholarship for students at the National Film and Television School (NTFS). According to the auction house, the program will support students at the globally renowned school over the next 20 years.

“The Crown’s huge global success has much to do with working with the best creative and production talent in this country and we want to invest the proceeds of this magnificent auction into the next generation of film and TV talent,” said Harries in a statement.

A special exhibition of items from the auction has been on a global tour—having already appeared in New York, Los Angeles, and Paris—and will remain on display at Bonhams London through Feb 5.

Leigh Thompson is the J. Jay Gerber Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations and a director of executive-education programs at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She is the author of several books, including “Negotiating the Sweet Spot: The Art of Leaving Nothing on the Table.”

I’m an extrovert and I admit I’ve benefited from it.

Outgoing people are more likely to be noticed, selected as leaders and awarded “halo” traits—meaning that other people just assume extroverts are more likeable, intelligent and have other positive qualities. But as a social scientist, I can’t ignore the research: Most of these beliefs about extroverts simply aren’t true.

Studies show that introverts and extroverts are equally effective in academic and corporate environments, and that there is no actual relation between CEO charisma and firm performance.

Yet the misconceptions about extroverts persist, making them more likely to be chosen as leaders over their more introverted peers. That’s unfortunate because in our post pandemic world, replete with remote work, hybrid communication, far-flung team members, artificial intelligence and global disruption, introverts are particularly well-equipped to lead.

That may be hard to believe because of two persistent myths.

First is the widely held stereotype that effective leaders are gregarious, alpha and comfortable in the spotlight, even craving that attention. In reality, the social skills that extroverts display aren’t necessarily predictive of capable leadership.

Second is the belief that quieter people lack leadership skills. They are seen as less social, unassertive, sad and disconnected. Indeed, in a recent study in which people in different groups were instructed to “act like an extrovert” or “act like an introvert” regardless of their actual personalities, those who acted extroverted were disproportionately selected for leadership. And, interestingly, those who pretended to be introverted in that study reported feeling sad.

Both of these myths ignore the reality that introversion, far from being simply a lack of extroversion, is a distinct set of traits with its own large merits. This was true well before the pandemic, but the remote-work environment illuminated the bias even more and highlighted the need to change our perceptions.

Here are five reasons why introverts could be ideal leaders in the redefined workplace.

1.Remote-work performance. Extroverts’ job performance declined when the pandemic forced many businesses to go remote. A study of remote workers found that extroverted employees became less productive, less engaged and less satisfied with their jobs. A separate study found that team average extroversion had a large negative effective on team performance—that is, the more extroverted the team members were as a group, the worse they performed.

2. Dealing with adversity and change. Introverts show a greater capacity to engage, think through and make wise choices during periods of adversity and change. A recent investigation found that introverts had more positive attitudes toward AI and using AI overall than did extroverts. A separate study found that during periods of high conflict, extroverts develop fewer energising relationships with their teammates and aren’t viewed as proactively contributing to the team. Introverts, however, often possess a predisposition for things like empathy and thoughtful communication—all critical for navigating team dynamics and conflict in tough times.

3. Creativity. Introverts’ creativity flows well in the quiet aftermath of group interactions, positioning them as formidable leaders for innovative and reflective tasks. In studies of communication and conflict, introverts’ tendency to think before speaking was seen to yield more creative solutions.

4.Avoiding avoidance. Most humans approach positive things and avoid negative things. Sounds like a good policy—unless we’re talking about workplace challenges. Research has shown that extroverts commit more passive avoidance errors—that is, when the going gets tough, they tend to avoid the situation altogether; meanwhile introverts are more likely to inspect the half-empty glass or the disappointing customer-satisfaction data, generating insights and solutions.

5. Resilience against quitting. A study of over 200 people revealed a correlation between extroversion and burnout—that is, the more extroverted a person reported themselves to be, the more likely they were to burn out. Introversion, on the other hand, was uncorrelated with burnout, suggesting better immunity.

Parents have always supported their children into adulthood, from funding weddings to buying a home. Now the financial umbilical cord extends much later into adulthood.

About 59% of parents said they helped their young adult children financially in the past year, according to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center that focused on adults under age 35. (This question hadn’t been asked in prior surveys.) More young adults are also living with their parents. Among adults under age 25, 57% live with their parents, up from 53% in 1993.

Parental support is continuing later in life because younger people now take longer to reach many adult milestones—and getting there is more expensive than it has been for past generations, economists and researchers said. There is also a larger wealth gap between older Americans and younger ones, giving some parents more means and reason to help. In short, adulthood no longer means moving off the parental payroll.

“That transition has gotten later and later, for a lot of different reasons. Now it’s age 25, 30, 35, 40,” said Sarah Behr, founder of Simplify Financial Planning in San Francisco.

Kami Loukipoudis, a 39-year-old director of design, and husband Adam Stojanik, a 39-year-old high-school teacher, knew they would need parental assistance to buy in New York’s expensive home market.

“We could pay a mortgage, but that down payment was the absolute crusher,” Stojanik said. “The idea of trying to save up on our own—as long as we were paying rents in NY, would’ve taken 300 years.”

Loukipoudis’s mother gave them the money for a 10% down payment on a two-bedroom apartment in the New York borough of Queens.

The young-adult allowance

Adult children aren’t necessarily getting larger checks from their parents, but they are staying on the parental payroll for longer than previous generations, according to Marla Ripoll, professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh who studied the trend by analysing payments from parents to adult children over a 20-year span.

Ripoll found that 14% of adult children receive a transfer of money from their parents at least once in any given year, and roughly half get financial help at some point within that period. Those rates have been stable for years. What has changed is that the transfers now continue for much longer, she found. This longer-term help might be a drag on social mobility, as it becomes even harder for young people from lower-income families to catch up, researchers said.

Of the young adult children who said they received financial help from a parent in the past year, most said they put it toward day-to-day household expenses, such as phone bills and subscriptions to streaming services like Netflix, according to the Pew survey.

The amount of money and the frequency of help varies by age; those on the older end of the 18-to-34 cohort are far likelier to say they are completely financially independent from their parents compared with younger adult children, as many in the latter group are completing their education. Nearly a third of young adult children between the ages of 30 and 34 say they still get parental help.

Heather McAfee, a 33-year-old physical therapist in Austin, Texas, said she lived at home between 2019 and 2021; otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to make progress paying down her student loans while rent prices in her area remained so high. The plan worked—she has since reduced her student-debt balance from $83,000 to $15,000.

“It helped tremendously,” she said. “I didn’t have to take out more loans to pay for apartment living or anything like that. That stress was gone.”

Setting limits on financial help

A little more than half of parents surveyed said that having their adult children home brought them closer together or improved their relationship, but nearly 20% said it dented their personal finances.

Financial advisers often find themselves in the tricky position of speaking to both ends of the equation: adult children who need assistance and the parents determined to help children well into middle age, within limits.

Whereas previous generations would step into a greater sense of financial independence in their early 20s, young adult children today are often unable to reach similar markers of such independence—living on their own or buying their first home, for example—without greater financial resources.

Families typically don’t set concrete rules around when financial help will happen and what the money is used for, which can result in surprises down the road, Behr said.

In one case, Behr’s clients received the down payment they needed to purchase a condo from a generous mother-in-law. Years later, that same mother-in-law told them she expected a payout once the couple sold the home.

The hand-me-down payment

Down-payment help from parents—a given for many first-time home buyers—is growing thanks to higher home prices and elevated mortgage rates.

About a fifth of first-time home buyers said they got help from a relative or friend when pulling together the money needed for a down payment, according to a 2023 survey of home buyers and sellers from the National Association of Realtors. And 38% of home buyers under age 30 received help with the down payment from their parents, according to a survey this spring by Redfin.

Wealthy families often go further than helping with the down payment. They become a true bank of mom and dad and write a mortgage. The Internal Revenue Service sets minimum levels of interest for such loans, which remain significantly cheaper than current mortgage rates.

Timothy Burke, chief executive at National Family Mortgage, which facilitates such loans, said parents are often frustrated on behalf of their house-hunting children. High interest rates and the cutthroat housing market are holding their children back from reaching a milestone the parents themselves were more easily able to access.

Mei Chao, a 41-year-old stay-at-home mom, and her husband, William Chao, a 44-year-old information-technology specialist, bought their first house as a couple in 2017. They relied on financial help from her husband’s two sisters and his mother to help them bridge a gap in their house-buying timeline. While they waited to sell William’s Manhattan condo, they used the money from the family to purchase the new house in Queens.

The structure of the agreements got tricky. After selling the condo in Manhattan, Mei and her husband were able to repay his sisters in full. But they didn’t have enough money left over from the sale to do the same for Mei’s mother-in-law. So they kept the mother-in-law’s name on the deed to the house—a concession Mei said they were both more than happy to make.

“Ultimately, it all worked out. I’m glad his mother pushed us,” Mei said. “Without her help, I could not say we would have this home.”