Beware the babbling nonsense from modern company bosses
Oh dear. He’s a friend of 35 years and he has a good mind and a kind heart and a family to feed and he can’t afford not to work. But now the company he works for has been swallowed by another company and the new company has produced a document entitled ‘‘Our Purpose’’. And my friend has sent me this document and when I reflect that he is obliged by circumstance to work for an outfit that wrote this document and disseminated it without shame, it makes me feel, well, unwell.
I had better not name him for fear that word gets back and he be flung on the dung heap of unemployment and his children succumb to rickets. But I weep to think of him imprisoned thus. I’ll call him Sam.
This company, this outfit that now owns Sam, claims to have a dream. ‘‘Our Dream’’ it says in capital letters on the top of the document.
Good things, dreams. Robert Graves called them the greatest show on Earth. But companies can’t have them. Their employees can, their employees’ higher order pets can, but companies can’t because a company is merely a legal entity. It lies of nights on a lawyer’s shelf and nothing goes on in the head it hasn’t got.
When a company claims to have a dream, it means only that the bosses and their PR whores have cooked something up to enshrine the bosses’ ambition for the company. And the bosses’ ambition for the company is always to make more money. They use the word dream only to impress others with their supposed romanticism.
Sam’s company’s dream consists of a grammatically incomplete sentence beginning with the word ‘‘architecting’’. If ever a word blew a trumpet and bellowed ‘‘Make way, make way, for His Excellency the Great Earl of Bulls--’’, it is architecting.
The problem is not that it uses a noun as a verb. Shakespeare did that all the time. But where Shakespeare sought new heights of expression, this document plumbs new depths of meaninglessness. It takes us to places where no light penetrates. Cop this for nonsense: Our Dream: Architecting connected human experiences . . .
There’s more, but let’s just pause. Can anyone, anyone, from mewling babe to octogenarian sage, tell me what those four words mean? And this from the company to which poor Sam has inadvertently found that his final working years are almost inescapably tethered. If you have tears, shed them. Here’s the dream in full: Architecting connected human experiences to lead the velocity era of marketing.
No. Stop. Don’t waste another second of your life sifting those words for meaning. There is none to be found, none. They are mere noise, mere wind. They are the linguistic equivalent of the groans, grunts and muffled explosions from the next stall of the public convenience.
But we are not done. Business gibberish is never done. It pours forth in a limitless torrent and because we live in a world in thrall to commerce it is rarely condemned. But it must be condemned because it is a travesty of language. It is evolutionary back-pedalling. It is a crime against everything that has hauled us from the swamp.
This company, this money-generating whoreson thing, has also made a list of – be strong now, Joe, just type it calmly – a list of ‘‘Our Behaviors’’.
No, I don’t for one moment mind the absent ‘‘u’’. I mind the absent decency, honesty and thought. For when a company announces ‘‘Our Behaviors’’, it means only the way the bosses think they want their hirelings to behave. The purpose being, once again, to impress.
And this is how the they begin, the company ‘‘behaviors’’. Be a Leader Be Brave Yes, you’re right, these so-called behaviours aren’t behaviours. Grammatically, they’re commands. Dear employees, they announce, dear beholden drudges, be leaders.
Ha! Can no one see the fallacy there? For if employee Sam obeys the command to be a leader, he’s doing what he’s told rather than doing the telling. In other words, he isn’t being a leader. Nor is he obeying the third of the commands on the list of ostensible ‘‘behaviors’’ which is – wait for it now Be Disruptive. Quite how Sam is supposed to be disruptive at work it doesn’t say. But I bet it doesn’t mean scoffing at screeds of company ra-ra.
There is a mass more of this guff, this bravura meaninglessness. The company’s ‘‘spirit’’, for example, is defined as ‘‘Beyond boundaries’’, its ‘‘Focus’’ as, ‘‘Pace and Purpose of People’’. I heard more sense from a mob of sheep.
But what matters is that power increasingly lies in the hands of people who spout this stuff and presumably see nothing wrong with it. Stand up to them now or we are all Sam.