Amazon - Our organizations are flooded with empty talk. We are constantly "going forward" to lands of "deliverables", stopping off on the "journey" to "drill down" into "best practice". Being an expert at using management speak has become more important in corporate life than delivering long lasting results. The upshot is that meaningless corporate jargon is killing our organizations.
In this book, management scholar André Spicer argues we need to call this empty talk what it is: bullshit. The book looks at how organizations have become vast machines for manufacturing, distributing and consuming bullshit. It follows how the meaningless language of management has spread through schools, NGOs, politics and the media.
Business Bullshit shows you how to spot business bullshit, considers why it is so popular, and outlines the impact it has on organizations and the people who work there. It also outlines what we can do to minimise bullshit at work. The author makes a case for why organizations need to avoid empty talk and reconnect with core activities.
2 comments:
Once Business Bullshit is recognized for what it is, it's amusing to listen to the motor-mouths spew it.
It's the antithesis of plain spoken informative English.
We've known about empty bureaucratic language for years, but these new (Silicon Valley-influenced) varieties are stunning smokescreens far worse than the '80s-'90s Dilbertesque CorpoSpeak. "Disruption?" Sounds like a guerilla talking about a small attack his group is planning to carry out. "Best practice?" Lawyerly-Doctorly talk out of a soap opera. The Nazi SS bureaucrats behind the Holocaust talked in an "office speak" to avoid thinking about the killing they were ordering and to hide it from outsiders - this is the faint ghost of that, but for other reasons.
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