The 1996 Spring/Summer issue of Social Text, a fashionable American cultural studies journal, featured an article entitled, ‘Transgressing the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravidity”. It was written by Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, and was full of absurdities. It proclaimed the most irrational of propositions and asserted conclusions of the so-called post-modernist type, that everything is relative (from morality to physics) and science – like everything else – is a social construct.
The whole article was written by linking absurd arguments using unclear or inaccurate terminology and drawing conclusions from totally unreasonable thought pathways. But it was happily published. When it was, an astonished Sokal went public declaring it a hoax. He had shown – through what he called an “unorthodox and uncontrolled experiment” – that one can get away with almost anything in these times of cultural fashion and questionable judgement.
Front pages of The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune,the UK’s Observer and the French Le Monde, all carried news of the hoax. But what started as a contained provocation soon extended to a debate on the broader issue of using sophisticated language borrowed from contemporary physics and mathematics and applying it to the social sciences – a typical ‘post-modernist’ debate. (See Higher Superstition. The academic left and its quarrels with science by Paul R Gross and Norman Levitt, The John Hopkins University Press, 1994)
What next? A book, first in French and then in English. Intellectual Impostures (Profile Books, 198) was written by Sokal with the help of Jean Bricmont, another physics professor, this time from Europe (Louvain, Belgium). The book is a devastating criticism on ‘la crème de la crème’ of mainly, but not only, French intellectuals and the use of scientific terms they don’t understand to pontificate on psychological/social/linguistic/political issues.
Having trained in psychiatry, I particularly enjoyed the chapter on French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who used mathematical terminology to discuss psychological and linguistic topics. As a student, I never understood a word of what Lacan had written. For a long time I considered I had a second-class brain unable to grasp intellectual constructs of the like of Lacan. Sokal and Bricmont redeemed me.
The authors soon became heroes. Articles proliferated, both for and against them, which were consolidated in a website. But enough about Sokal and the French intellectuals. Business has its own ‘Sokal syndrome’, inundated by jargon and often meaningless terminology. The advantage is that guru-jargon is less pretentious and one can spot it more easily, without having to spend a lot of time debating whether or not the problem is in one’s genetically limited brain. I want to propose that one of the primary roles of the modern business leaders should be to uncover ‘intellectual nudity’. And we have a lot of that around.
Word playing and permutation are, of course, not the sole preserve of business jargon. They seem to have a more natural home in politics. In the last British general election, for example, the following declaration of intentions went like this: “The power of all for the good of each, ours is the passion rallied with reason.” One could even get the order wrong in the reading or listening and still get ‘a message’. But was it “the power of passion of each, allied to reason, for the good of all”, or “the passion of all for the good of reason”? The speaker, Tony Blair, became British Prime Minister a few weeks later.
The power of rhetoric
Uncovering intellectual nudity in business life is essential if one wants to make some sense of the corporation of the future. “The guru has no clothes” is sometimes a shouting imperative but people are still reluctant to shout, perhaps worried that, like Lacan and me, they might have missed something. There are not many good management ideas of substance in the forest of management rhetoric. It is urgent to get a fresh look and crusade for plain English (or French, or Spanish) business discourse.
It would be wrong to align rhetoric with garbage. We must not dismiss the power of rhetoric. On the contrary, as the history of mankind proves, from politics to home psychology, the word matters. Business leadership must be taught in such a way that new generations can learn to distinguish between the signal and the noise. At the moment, the noise is of polluting magnitude. The power of rhetoric and its use in business history is the main theme of an old book I have read a few times and thoroughly recommend. It is called Beyond the hype. Rediscovering the essence of management by Robert G Eccles and Nitin Nohria (Harvard Business School Press, 1992).
You may not have noticed it, but perfectly reasonable people who behave normally over the weekend, talking properly to other people at the supermarket checkout for example, become aliens on Monday morning when they get to the office. Strange terminology takes over and talk of ‘bottom lines’, ‘net-net’ and ‘closer to the customer’ starts.
A few months ago, in a corporate meeting, I took note of each time somebody said ‘we, as a team’. I had to stop because I soon got bored. Imagine talking to your neighbours in the evening over a beer and using some sort of majestic ‘we, as a family, are going to buy new curtains’. The next thing I noted at that meeting was ‘at this point in time’. I am sure you have lots as well.
If you are interviewing somebody who says he wants to come aboard because he ‘wants to contribute to your customer-driven strategy and make a difference to your bottom-line through clear vision and enhancement of shareholder value’, call 999. There is always a psychiatrist on call. In the past, people have been detained for less than that.
Don’t tolerate pollution
Don’t tolerate pollution. You may be one of those who are careful about fresh air and hate to be in a traffic jam, for example, inhaling fumes. It is bad for your body so you avoid it. You just don’t expose yourself or your children to polluted air. Period. What you may not realise is that this is nothing compared with the jargon pollution that is impacting your brain. Avoid mental pollution as you do would the rest. Hire people who have a reasonable command of their mother tongue and show no signs of alien contamination. You must protect your mental health against ‘word permutators’. Remember, infectious diseases are no joke. They have individual and social consequences. Make a point of having enough vaccine to inoculate your entire department. For example, ban the use of words such as ’empowerment’, unless people explain immediately what they mean. ‘We have empowered teams’ is a dangerous statement unless explained because it contributes to a false sense of normality, a feeling of stability and the illusion of having a validated, model organisation. In reality, it may mean nothing or, at least, different things depending on who is saying it.
Create your own list. At your next departmental meeting, have a flip chart and spend a few minutes deciding which terms to ban. You will be surprised how quickly suggestions come up. Give people some prospect of mental freedom ad they will jump in. I did this exercise once banning the expression ‘it depends’ in the context of ‘would you do this or that?’ and I can assure you we had a completely different meeting.
Don’t hire airport-business-school graduates. They have read the five laws of empowerment and the ten habits of the successful manager on the way to Chicago and think they deserve an MBA for that alone. Get on board people who can exercise judgement and speak to you in the same language they speak to their spouse in the evening (that is, when managers become normal people again). I have had managers come to me for a 20-minute meeting and start with the words: “well, the three things I want to achieve today from this meeting are…” All that, just as a starter and almost without a ‘good morning’. I said to one of them, “please, relax, it’s OK. No need to show me a categorical, numerical, ordinal world of 1,2,3. When you go home, do you really say, “darling, the three things I want to achieve tonight are…”?” The guy laughed and we had a normal conversation.
We are also creating a bullet-point society leading to ‘The end of judgement’. In this societal model, arguments must be summarised in three bullet points and judgements condensed on the basis of a ‘give-me-the-net-net’ statement. It is, of course, the sound bit society that the current educational system is creating in most western countries.
Business dynamics and their theoretical/applied pillars (organisational architecture and development, human resources, strategy-systems-structure setting, operational practices, and so on) need strong cultivation of judgement plus plain English. If what is needed is to shout ‘le roi est nu’ (the shorter French version of ‘the emperor has no clothes’) so be it. Somebody on the payroll may need to stand up and proclaim: “My dear guru who is influencing our current rhetoric and business practices, you have the intellectual strength of a cream cake. Thanks for your contributions. I am going to exercise what is left of my brain.” It may be just one of those revolutionary behaviours that could make the difference.
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