Why business people write books like "Why business people speak like idiots" like idiots

Monday Jan 16, 2006

A chronic insomniac, I get through a lot of business books, and crotchety before my time as I am, I was immediately interested in Why business people speak like idiots.
Customers who bought this book also bought: On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt

WBPSLI

From the horses mouth...

Indeed, it starts quite well deconstructing the vocabulary of business, and especially the IT business, questioning why it seems increasingly abstract, e.g. "leading enterprise-class software that distributes and virtualises computer-intensive application services and processes across existing heterogenous IT resources creating a shared, scalable and fault-tolerant infrastructure delivering faster, more reliable application performance". Actually, I didn't think that was even so bad.

Sadly, the book does not explore any of the more constructive reasons that people use such conceptual language, and I for one don't object to being told something needs to be robust (translation: it will be critically scrutinised) or being asked to identify synergies (do your best to work with those people) etc. as long as such demands are placed thoughtfully. Things can be vague for good reasons as well as bad.

But then, there are books like O'Reilly's Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing. This gem, in what was supposed to be a clarification note on the difference between a patent and a copyright:

"This limitation to the expression of an idea is the principal distinction betweem the applications of patent and copyright. Unlike copyright, a valid patent does not protect the expression of an idea but the underlying substance of it."

Confused? I was. Especially when I realised that my original understanding of the distinction (which is probably the same as yours) was the correct one. It's because the author uses the unhelpful terms "expression of an idea" to mean the realisation into substance of an idea and "underlying substance" to mean the conceptual component. [Disclaimer: do not base anything on anything you read here. Consult a lawyer, a good one.]

UOSAFSL

Hand over the expression of all yer cash

Anyway, back to WBPSLI. After a promising start, exposing examples of deliberate and subconscious obfuscation, the book just degenerates into a sort of self-help manual for those who don't feel able to express themselves at work. It urges you to become the office clown, and to grasp the need for informality and authenticity, which brings me on to my next book. And it's a famous one:

UOSAFSL

All aboard

Now, I'm certainly not going to dismiss The Cluetrain Manifesto. It's clearly an important book, and it is now available for free download here somewhere. I could wax lyrical about how we're only starting to feel the changes it described five years ago, but you're not still reading this if you wanted to hear that (not that you are still reading this). Rather, you'd want me to point out that, for such a good book, parts of it are extraordinarily badly written. Like the foreword:

"Take a pot of water that's just above the freezing mark. Now, crank up the heat and wait. Temperature rises. Wait some more. Go all the way to 211 degrees Farenheit and nothing looks much different. But then, turn it up one more tiny degree and wham! The pot becomes a roiling, steamy cauldron.

Don't look now, but you're holding such a catalyst in your hands."

Nothing wrong with that, expect that there is no refence to a catalyst in the first paragraph, nor anything that could be metaphorically considered a catalyst. The author did, however, invite you to imagine that you're holding a boiling kettle of water in your hands. And it's the zealous use of symbolism that dogs certain chapters:

"Honda, Toyota and Volkswagen exploded into the North American market like a tsunami."

Exploding tsunamis? That does sound dangerous. But this was my favourite:

Mass production, mass market and mass media have constituted the Holy Trinity of American business for at least a hundred years. The payoffs were so huge that the mindset became an addiction, a drug blinding its users to changes that began to erode the old axioms attaching to economies of scale."

Got that? In the space of two sentences, mass marketing was a theological doctrine, a demeanour, both a dependency to an addictive substance and an addictive substance, and one that causes blindness. Now that's a lot of imagery. So, how might Why business people speak like idiots have preferred this to be expressed?

"Due to its great success in mass markets, U.S. business was irrationally slow to respond to changing patterns of mass production."

But I don't think that all the florid language was there to mask the blandness of the analysis, whatever WBPSLI might say. It's just received behaviour. We read things like this, we write things like this. My proof? Well, the authors list a full page of things for which the initials PSR might stand, and proceed to call them acronyms.

Now, if they were all pronounced "pisser", then acronyms they most certainly would be, but they are more likely to be pronounced "PEE-ESS-ARR", and are consequently mere abbreviations. (This is a particular bug-bear of mine). "Acronym", like a host of other words, is frequently misused by idiots like me, and, it seems, by the authors of Why business people speak like idiots. Physician, heal thyself.

p.s. The views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer and parts of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" are actually rather well written.