My ‘corporate’ friends, especially those in the management consulting space, will not buy me drinks after this piece but I think I should clue you guys in, a bit.
I founded and used to run a relatively big healthcare company, by Ugandan standards, and I have listened to endless ‘pitches’ from ‘management consultants’.
Half the time, my team and I needed copious amounts of coffee to keep awake through laboured lectures from individuals whose real world understanding of business did not go beyond the excel spreadsheets before them.
All this to say that there is a whole different world out there that a lot of you might not be a part of but it powers a lot of the organisations you rely on for your everyday needs. It is a world that corporations world over run to for ‘strategic advice’ to ‘retool’, ‘build intentionality’, shake their staff from ‘bureaucratic slumber’, impart in them ‘end-state visions’, learn to be ‘lean and efficient’ and ‘maximise returns’.
They get into these ‘thought showers’ where ideas are bounced around and the best, like cream, ‘gravitate to the top’. These showers can take on different techniques, to wit; ‘nominal group technique’, ‘stepladder’, Delphi technique etc. Space constraints won’t allow me break down each but if you’ve read this far, I trust your curiosity to allow you delve deeper, scratch that; ‘take a deep-dive’ into the underbelly of organisational speak.
In case you are wondering why these ‘thought showers are not called just what they are, it is because ‘brainstorm sessions’ is for the great unwashed.
Consultancy is an esoteric space with a more refined lexicon.
The more pompous, the better.
This tribe commands hefty management fees to sell you largely dry, recycled reports with a sprinkling of seemingly avant-garde ideas peppered with a language of psychic liberation.
Basically, warm bull dung with an accent. It didn’t surprise me to read in mid-October that in Australia, Deloitte was asked to pay back part of their $440,000 fees to the Albanese government for handing them a report largely written with generative artificial intelligence.
One Senator accused the global management consultancy firm of ‘having a human intelligence problem’. Sometimes I feel that half of consultants’ deliverables are rooted in the language.
High sounding gobbledygook that bamboozles the recipient but tells them precious little. The other half is in part great graphics confidently delivered and then an occasional good idea or two.
But how did the corporate world learn how to speak like this?
When did high sounding nonsense become the lingua franca of corporations up and down the globe? The answer might partly lie in early 1980s California and a telephone company called Pacific Bell.
Facing deregulation-and the uncertainties that comes with it-in an industry they had run as a virtual monopoly, they turned to an organisational consultant named Charles Krone.
Borrowing from the ideas of 20th Century Russian philosopher and spiritual teacher, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, Krone went on to design a multi-million dollar programme for Pacific Bell’s staff that was meant to ‘transform the way people thought, talked and behaved’.
The rest as they say is history. The world of ‘scientific management’ embraced this language and now you will hear it echoing across the hallways of corporate entities, within an earshot of our tiny cubicles to which we are confined for most of our days in the hunt for the almighty buck.
Like the hand signs that high-school friend groups make to identify with each other, mastering this speak is what announces your arrival to this rarefied group of important corporate men and women. Friendly advice; remember to occasionally step out of it and actually live. It is not a real world.