You should not be surprised to learn that in my travels across the legal, business, and strategic commentariat, I form opinions–some probably too quickly or too definitively–about the quality of what I’m reading.
As an exercise that began as casual amusement I began jotting down a list of phrases that at a glance seemed impressive and even deep, but which I stored away for later more systematic analysis. I just conducted that analysis.
They are puerile: Vacuous, devoid of intellectual content, nonsense on fancy-sounding stilts.
Here they are, in no order:
- A connected, intelligent ecosystem
- Structured data, institutional knowledge, context-rich
- Dynamic (> static)
- Trusted enterprise systems
- Maintaining guardrails
- Well-permissioned
- Surfacing value
- Leveraging data visualization
- The next phase of […] at scale
- Semantic, cross-system search
- Cross-functional teams
- Operationalize
- Velocity pivot
- Hunger to win
- Relentless execution
- Strategic waterfall
- Helicopter view
- Tentpole
- Circle back
- Bias for action
- Transforming the value proposition
- Hockey stick
- Customer-centricity
- Global/local
- Gates/milestones
- Stretch goals
- Corporate DNA
- Utilize headroom
- Full stack
- Thinking like an owner
- Day One
Now, I’m a sympathetic and non-judgmental person by nature and if you recognize any of these, or their near cognates, in things you or your firm have said, forgiveness; you are not alone. The problem is not slipping up or lazy thinking every now and then, the problem is when it becomes systematic. My fear is that public discourse has been trending descending in this direction.
I’ve tried to adopt a tone of jocularity here, but there’s something much more serious afoot. E.M. Forster wrote, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” When people who have been marinated in PR training spout things like the vacuities above, your antennae should tell you that the emperor has no clothes. And once candor and coherence are forfeited, how can they ever be regained? Do these people actually “know what [they] think”? If not, this ceases to be amusing.
It seems to me there are two possible explanations.
- They have not actually thought about it, so perforce they don’t know what to say. Or
- They do have an opinion or point of view but fear it could be viewed by some as offensive or politically incorrect.
The first is intellectual laziness of the first order and the second is obsequious and cowardly. I have no strong feelings which is worse.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
Draft manuscript (imaginary; created by Gemini AI)
