CHAPTER 2

MANAGEMENT OF MEANING

Problems, Problems, Problems
by Raymond Smullyan

Once when I was playing for a musician, he complimented me on the way I played a particular passage. He told me how well I handled a certain modulation and added, ‘You don’t realize in what a remarkable way you have solved this problem!’

I must say, I was thunderstruck … I was totally unaware of any problem let alone solving one! The whole idea of ‘problem solving’, especially in music, strikes me as so weird. Not only weird, but most disharmonious and destructive. Is that how you think of life, as a series of problems to be solved? No wonder you don’t enjoy living more than you do!

To compliment a musician, or any other artist, on having ‘solved problems’ to me is absolutely analogous to complimenting the waves of the ocean for solving such a complex system of partial differential equations. Of course, the ocean does its ‘waving’ in accordance with these differential equations, but it hardly solves them … I believe my objection to the notion of ‘problem’ is due to my deep conviction that the moment one labels something as a ‘problem’ that’s when the real problem starts.

Source: Raymond Smullyan

Accenture’s next champion of waffle words
By Lucy Kellaway

When one door closes, another one opens. On Thursday the prison gates clanked shut behind Martin Lukes in Florida but, in London, the door of an office inside Accenture swung ajar, revealing Mark Foster, a middle-aged white man with a long-winded title.

Just as I was putting my final full stop to the story of the jargon-talking executive, someone forwarded me an internal e-mail sent by Accenture’s group chief executive for management consulting. Immediately I saw that this man could be a possible successor to Lukes. I don’t know if Mr Foster has Martin’s way with women or whether his golf swing is any good, as I have never met him. However, I have seen one of his e-mails and that is enough to convince me that, when it comes to world-class jargon, there is clear blue water between him and the rest – even at Accenture, where the bar, as they call it, is set so very high.

This isn’t the first time I’ve singled out Accenture for its work in the jargon space. A couple of years ago, I wrote a column about its annual report, which was a perfect snapshot of the ugliest business language of the time. Inside was an orgy of ‘relentless passion’ and ‘delivering value’. The point, presumably, was to impress clients.

Yet Mr Foster’s e-mail is more troubling as it shows top people write like this even when they think no clients are looking. His memo was addressed to ‘All Accenture Senior Executives’ – though title inflation being what it is, this probably stretches to include the cleaner. Indeed as ‘group chief executive’, Mr Foster is in a band of eight others with the same commanding title, and still has a couple of rungs to climb before reaching the very top.

The memo starts with some background to the announcement: ‘…wanting to give you continued visibility of our growth platform agenda …’ it says. Visibility is the latest thing in business. Companies and executives all crave it but, until last week, I didn’t know that growth platform agendas were after it too. What is he saying here, I wonder? I think, though couldn’t swear to it, that he wants to tell his colleagues how the company plans to make more money.

And so to the meat of the memo. ‘We are changing the name of the Human Performance service line to Talent & Organization Performance, effective immediately.’

Before you marvel at the stupidity of the name change, note first that departments can’t even be called that: they are instead ‘service lines’. As for the name, the old one may have been no great shakes, but to take away the ‘human’ (which was surely the point) and replace it with ‘talent and organisation’ is not progress. As I’ve often remarked before, the word ‘talent’ is a hideous misnomer as most people aren’t terribly talented at all.

Next comes the business rationale for the change. ‘With the rise of the multi-polar world, the task of finding and managing talent has become more complex, turbulent and contradictory than ever before.’

This conflicts with two laws, the first of geography – there are only two poles – and the second of business – finding ‘talent’ has always been hard as there isn’t enough to go round. The only excuse for saying it is ‘complex, turbulent and contradictory’ is to make it sound so complicated that the services of Accenture must be needed to sort it out.

Mr Foster says that what must be done is to teach organisations to ‘expand their talent management agenda from a narrow and tactical focus on human resources activities around the employee life cycle, to a broad and strategic focus on highly integrated systems of capabilities fundamental to business strategies and operations’. This is shameful, outrageous bilge. HR should be narrow. It should be specifically focused around the employee life cycle (if that means hiring, training, promoting, firing).

His suggestion is frightening. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen quite so many waffle words crammed together in one sentence. Broad. Strategic. Focus. Highly. Integrated. System. Capabilities. Fundamental. Strategies. Indeed the only words here that are acceptable are ‘to’, ‘and’ and ‘on’.

I will spare you further long quotes from this dismal memo, which contains much ‘stepping up’, ‘blue water’, ‘space’ and ‘walking the talk’. There is an obsession with capabilities. In four different places Mr Foster talks about ‘repositioning’ them, ‘differentiating’ them, ‘integrating’ them and ‘evolving’ them. This sounds like quite hard work, especially as I’m not quite sure what capabilities are anyway.

There is only one sentence I like – ‘Already we are seeing great progress!’ – though it would be better still without the gung-ho exclamation mark.

Alas, the claim turns out to be unsubstantiated. The only progress mentioned is that the head of the newly named service line has written a book called The Talent Powered Organization and, to celebrate, Accenture is inviting clients to a party on Second Life – which I suppose cuts down on the bar bill.

How much does all this nonsense matter? Accenture isn’t selling pensions to widows; if its rich corporate clients are prepared to buy HR services designed for a multi-polar world, that is their lookout.

However, there is something else about the memo that worries me more. Accenture’s website reveals that, unlike Martin Lukes, Mr Foster has a classics degree from Oxford. I had always thought the point of studying classics was that it trained your mind and your pen. What this memo shows is that two decades at Accenture have a more potent effect on befuddling the mind than three years of Aeschylus and Horace ever had on sharpening it.

Source: Lucy Kellaway, Financial Times, 27 January 2008.

Mana-gems

One of us, Henry, collects typographic errors – ‘typos’, as they are called. (It’s easier than collecting antique cars.) He writes his books and articles – literally, badly. So when they get typed, almost anything can happen. And now, with the use of email, and him banging away madly at the keyboard, more carnage appears on the screen. A sampling of all this follows. Be prepared: there is a lot of wisdom in serendipity. (Henry would like to express his deep appreciation to his assistants over the past 16 years, Santa Balanca-Rodrigues and Kate Maguire, for their profound contributions to what follows.)

Subject: new element for Periodic Table

The heaviest element known to science is Managerium. This element has no protons or electrons, but has a nucleus composed of   1 neutron, 2 vice-neutrons, 5 junior vice-neutrons, 25 assistant vice-neutrons, and 125 junior assistant vice-neutrons all going round in circles.

Managerium has a half-life of three years, at which time it does not decaybut institutes a series of reviews leading to reorganization. Its molecules are held together by means of the exchange of tiny particles known as morons.

Source: Unknown.

PowerPoint is evil
By Edward Tufte

Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.

Yet slideware – computer programs for presentations – is everywhere: in corporate America, in government bureaucracies, even in our schools. Several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year. Slideware may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.

Of course, data-driven meetings are nothing new. Years before today’s slideware, presentations at companies such as IBM and in the military used bullet lists shown by overhead projectors. But the format has become ubiquitous under PowerPoint, which was created in 1984 and later acquired by Microsoft. PowerPoint’s pushy style seeks to set up a speaker’s dominance over the audience. The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to followers. Could any metaphor be worse? Voicemail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides – a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

In a business setting, a PowerPoint slide typically shows 40 words, which is about eight seconds’ worth of silent reading material. With so little information per slide, many, many slides are needed. Audiences consequently endure a relentless sequentiality, one damn slide after another. When information is stacked in time, it is difficult to understand context and evaluate relationships. Visual reasoning usually works more effectively when relevant information is shown side by side. Often, the more intense the detail, the greater the clarity and understanding. This is especially so for statistical data, where the fundamental analytical act is to make comparisons.

Consider an important and intriguing table of survival rates for those with cancer relative to those without cancer for the same time period. Some 196 numbers and 57 words describe survival rates and their standard errors for 24 cancers.

Applying the PowerPoint templates to this nice, straightforward table yields an analytical disaster. The data explodes into six separate chaotic slides, consuming 2.9 times the area of the table. Everything is wrong with these smarmy, incoherent graphs: the encoded legends, the meaningless color, the logo-type branding. They are uncomparative, indifferent to content and evidence, and so data-starved as to be almost pointless. Chartjunk is a clear sign of statistical stupidity. Poking a finger into the eye of thought, these data graphics would turn into a nasty travesty if used for a serious purpose, such as helping cancer patients assess their survival chances. To sell a product that messes up data with such systematic intensity, Microsoft abandons any pretense of statistical integrity and reasoning.

Good

A traditional table: rich, informative, clear

Bad

PowerPoint chartjunk: smarmy, chaotic, incoherent

Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won’t make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.

At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play – very loud, very slow, and very simple.

The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience.

Reprinted by permission, Edward R. Tufte, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (Graphics Press, Cheshire, CT, September 2003), as appeared in Wired magazine.

Planning as Public Relations
By Henry Mintzberg

Some organizations use planning as a tool, not because anyone necessarily believes in the value of the process, but because influential outsiders do. Planning becomes a game, called ‘public relations’.

Thus ‘city governments hire consultants to do “strategic planning” to impress bond rating agencies (Nutt, 1984a: 72) and ‘what is frequently called a ‘plan’ by a university is really an investment brochure;’ (Cohen and March, 19). In government, leaders who ‘wish to be thought modem … have a document with which to dazzle their visitors.’ And why shouldn’t they? After all, ‘capitalist America insisted upon a plan’ in return for its foreign aid to poor countries: ‘it did not matter whether the plan worked; what did count was the ability to produce a document which looked like a plan’ (Wildavsky, 1973: 140, 151).

In a narrow sense, of course, some of this ‘planning’ seems to be justified. After all, supermarkets need their capital, the developing nations need their aid, universities need their support. In the poorer nations, national planning ‘may be justified on a strictly cash basis: planners may bring in more money from abroad than it costs to support them at home’ (Wildavsky, 1973:151).

But in a broader sense, is this kind of planning justified at all? Leaving aside the obvious waste of resources – money that could be saved if everyone stopped playing the game – public relations planning probably distorts priorities. In poor nations, for example, it misallocates skills that are in short supply, and that could be devoted to solving real problems (or doing useful planning). Even in more developed countries, think of how much time and talent has been wasted over the years. Worse, what is intended as public relations can be taken seriously when it should not be.  

Add all this together, and public relations planning becomes a means by which almost everyone, no matter how intent on using planning to gain control, ends up losing it. Outsiders get useless pronouncements, and junior managers waste time filling out forms while senior managers get distracted from the more important issues. Only the planners come out on top. And that makes such planning for them fundamentally political.

In the final analysis, in the experiences of western corporations no less than of communist states, planning used for image instead of substance ties everyone in knots and so ends up controlling everybody.

The Opposite of a Profound Truth Is Also True
by Richard Farson

Our great achievements in science, law, government, and in every intellectual pursuit are dependent upon our development as rational, logical thinkers.

But this kind of thinking has also limited us. Without quite knowing it, we have become creatures of linear, categorical logic. Things are good or bad, true or false, but not both. We have been taught that a thing cannot be what it is and also it’s opposite. Yet it sounds wise when confronted with a conflict to say, ‘Well, yes and no.’ Or, ‘It’s both.’ We’ve all heard statements that concede the coexistence of opposites: Less is more. Living is dying. Hating is loving. Although it seems illogical, no two things are as closely related as opposites.

Systematic Buzz Word Generator
by Lew Gloin