No gadgets for spy job

If James Bond is to be believed, the most important skill for MI6’s ‘‘Q’’ is to be able to produce exploding pens, spiked umbrellas and invisibility cloaks. The mundane reality? An ‘‘inclusive management style’’ is among the attributes that Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service is seeking from its next technology chief, along with courage and integrity. A job advertisement also says candidates must keep their application secret from everyone except their spouse or a close family member. The ad for the job, which will be filled from outside the agency for the first time, reads: ‘‘As Q, you are responsible for the teams who create and adopt technologies to enable our mission against the UK’s hardest adversaries.’’ Life has imitated art, with MI6 copying the fictional name when it revamped its technical branch. The ad says the successful candidate, who will be one of the deputies to the MI6 chief, will have ‘‘a track record of delivering digital transformation and cultural change’’.