{OT:} Weasel words have the teeth to kill great ventures
- From: "edspyhill01@xxxxxxxxx" <edspyhill01@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2009 08:04:45 -0800 (PST)
Corporate cube rats will find this familiar.
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Weasel words have the teeth to kill great ventures
By John Kay
Published: January 14 2009 02:00 | Last updated: January 14 2009 02:00
Vaclav Havel, dissident, poet and playwright, was the first post-
communist president of the Czech Republic. In a famous essay, The
Power of the Powerless , written under Soviet occupation of his
country, he described a greengrocer who displayed in his window a sign
saying "Workers of the World Unite!"
No one took the content of the declaration seriously - least of all
the authorities who provided the sign, who would have been appalled at
the prospect that the workers of the world might indeed unite.
Czechoslovakia was not an especially brutal tyranny and the
greengrocer would probably not have suffered sanctions for failing to
give the placard a position of prominence. So what was the purpose of
the display? Mr Havel argued that it represented a declaration of
conformity. By placing the sign, the greengrocer said: "I do not want
trouble." He was responding to the human desire to avoid
confrontation. That signal of compliance was what his rulers sought.
Like George Orwell, Mr Havel described "living within the lie". Both
saw how the dishonesty inherent in such acquiescence ultimately
corrupted all aspects of life, personal as well as political.
Themselves masters of language, both men understood that the abuse of
language was central to that corruption. In 1984 , and even more
effectively in his essay on political language, Orwell explained how
political rhetoric was constructed by sticking together reiterated
phrases that had ceased to be connected to their literal meaning.
In western liberal democracies, no one exhibits slogans calling on the
workers to unite. But you see similar displays in reception areas of
businesses and even in government offices. They urge us to pursue
excellence, to delight our customers, to be wholehearted in our
embrace of change. Employees place these exhortations on desks and
walls with the same resignation as the Czech greengrocer. The modern
analogue of the address to the party congress is the business speech,
in which tired clichés relentlessly follow each other, to similarly
sycophantic applause.
For Orwell, writing in the 1940s, the language of politics was the
most debased. But the new political leaders of the west were men such
as Harry Truman and Clement Attlee, who spoke plainly because they
knew no other vocabulary. In the postwar era, business took over from
politics as the theatre of empty rhetoric. More recently, however,
government has reimported that style from the private sector. Official
documents, once relatively factual statements of situations and
policies, are increasingly full of self-congratulation and bogus
statistics. They resemble the annual reports of corporations.
Lucy Kellaway, the FT columnist, routinely mocks such nonsense. But,
as Orwell and Mr Havel realised, these vapid expressions are not
harmless. The objective of the patronising drivel emitted by
politicians and business people is to drive out argument. Engaged
debate is replaced by what Jack Welch, the former General Electric
chief executive, memorably characterised as "superficial
congeniality". Apparent consensus is achieved by euphemism, by
avoiding issues of substance and by using slogans instead of analysis.
Mr Welch saw that the opposite of superficial congeniality was "facing
reality". But the effect, and intention, of the tacit compliance
involved in superficial congeniality is to entrench a reality of
power: to legitimise authority based only on the occupation of
positions of authority.
Living within the lie, because it does not face reality, is the
process by which great organisations fall into catastrophic errors -
and through which they often fail to recognise these errors even after
their consequences have become apparent. The self-deception of living
within the lie is how banks fell victim to the credit crunch and the
US came to be embroiled in Iraq. The greengrocer, and millions like
him, perpetuated a great evil by acquiescing in a minor deceit.
Dishonesty of speech quickly leads to dishonesty in behaviour because
the language we use governs all we do.
John Kay's new book, The Long and the Short of It, is published on
January 20
www.johnkay.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
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