How management-speak invaded the workplace
When did executive idea sherpas get their ducks in a row and self-actualise corporate jargon, and what’s the outlook going forward? André Spicer looks at the history of management-speak
In early 1984, executives at the American telephone company Pacific Bell made a fateful decision. They were worried that Pacific Bell didn’t have the right culture, that employees were not sufficiently entrepreneurial. So they turned to a well-known organisational development specialist, Charles Krone, who set about designing a management-training programme to transform the way people thought, talked and behaved.
The “Kroning” programme was based on the ideas of the 20th century Russian mystic George Gurdjieff, who believed that most of us spend our days mired in “waking sleep”, and that it is only by shedding ingrained habits of thinking that we can liberate our inner potential. Staff at Pacific Bell were instructed in new concepts such as “the law of three” (a “thinking framework that helps us identify the quality of mental energy we have”), and discovered the importance of “alignment”, “intentionality” and “end-state visions”. This new vocabulary was designed to awaken employees from their bureaucratic doze and open their eyes to a new, higher-level consciousness. But it had some unfortunate side effects. First, according to one former middle manager, it was virtually impossible for anyone outside the company to understand “Kronese”. Second, the manager said, this new language “led to a lot more meetings”, and the amount of time wasted nurturing this higher consciousness meant that “everything took twice as long”.
Although Kroning was packaged in the New Age language of psychic liberation, it was backed by all the threats of an authoritarian corporation. For instance, one manager was summoned to her superior’s office after a team member walked out of a Kroning session. She was asked to “force out or retire” the rebellious employee. Some Pacific Bell employees wrote to their congressmen about Kroning. The Californian utility regulator launched a public inquiry and eventually closed the training course, but not before $40m dollars had been spent.
During this period, a young computer programmer at Pacific Bell started drawing a cartoon that mercilessly mocked the management-speak that had invaded his workplace. The comic strip featured a hapless office drone, his disaffected colleagues, his evil boss and an even more evil management consultant. It was a hit, syndicated in newspapers across the world. The programmer’s name was Scott Adams and the series he created was Dilbert. You can still find these images pinned up in office cubicles today. These days, Kronese seems relatively benign compared to much of the vacuous language in circulation. Words like “intentionality”
sound quite sensible when compared to “ideation”, “imagineering”, and “inboxing” – the sort of management-speak used to talk about everything from educating children to running nuclear power plants. This language has become a kind of organisational lingua franca, used by middle managers in the same way that Freemasons use secret handshakes – to indicate their membership and status. It echoes across the cubicled landscape. It seems to be everywhere, and refers to anything and nothing. The kind of bullshit through which we all have to wade is a remarkably recent creation. To understand why, we have to look at how management fashions have changed over the past hundred years or so.
During the 19th century, when factories became more common, a new class of boss emerged: the manager. Keen to be recognised as part of the professional classes, managers saw themselves as a kind of engineer, complete with stopwatches and rulers. In the process they created the first major workplace fashion: scientific management. Firms started recruiting efficiency experts to conduct time and motion studies. After recording every single movement of a worker in minute detail, the time and motion expert would rearrange the worker’s performance of tasks into a more efficient order. Their aim was to make the worker into a well-functioning machine. This was not limited to the workplaces of the capitalist West – Stalin pushed for similar techniques to be imposed in factories throughout the Soviet Union. But workers found the new techniques alien and a backlash inevitably followed. Charlie Chaplin famously satirised scientific management in his 1936 film Modern Times, which depicts a factory worker who is slowly driven mad by the pressures of life on the production line.
Soon, executives began casting around for alternatives. They found inspiration in a series of experiments conducted by psychologists in the 1920s, at a factory complex in Illinois where tens of thousands of workers were employed making telephone equipment. A team of researchers from Harvard had initially set out to discover whether changes in environment, such as adjusting the lighting, could influence how much workers produced each day. But they found that no matter how light or dark the factory, the only thing that made a difference to output was the amount of attention that workers got from the researchers. This led one of the researchers, an Australian-born psychologist called Elton Mayo, to conclude that the “human aspects” of work were far more important than “environmental”
“The language is used by middle managers in the same way that Freemasons use secret handshakes”
factors. While this may seem obvious, it came as news to many executives at the time. As Mayo’s ideas caught hold, companies attempted to humanise their workplaces. They started conducting personality testing and team-building exercises, all in the hope of nurturing good human relations at work.
This new-found interest in the human side of work did not last long. During the Second World War, as the US and UK military invested heavily in trying to make war more efficient, management fashions began to shift. A bright young Berkeley graduate called Robert Mcnamara led a US army air forces team that used statistics to plan the most cost-effective way to flatten Japan in bombing campaigns. After the War, the mathematical management procedures that he had developed were taken up by companies to help plan the best way to deliver cheese, toothpaste and Barbie dolls to American consumers. Today these techniques are known as supply-chain management.
By the postwar years, the individual worker was once again a cog in a large, hierarchical machine. The backlash came in the late 1960s, when the youth movement railed against the conformity demanded by big corporations. Protesters sprayed slogans such as “live without dead time” and “to hell with boundaries” onto city walls around the world. They wanted to be themselves, express who they really were, and not have to obey “the Man”. In response to this cultural change, management fashions changed again. In the 1970s, executives began attending New Age workshops to help them “self-actualise” by unlocking their hidden “human potential”. Companies instigated “encounter groups”, in which employees could explore their deeper emotions. Offices were redesigned to look more like university campuses than factories. Work became a place you could go to find yourself. Corporate mission statements now sounded like the revolutionary graffiti of the 1960s. The ground was laid for Krone.
Since then, the spin cycle of management-speak has sped up. During the 1980s, the ideas of Harvard Business School’s Michael C. Jensen started to find favour. Jensen saw a corporation as a portfolio of assets. Even people – labelled “human resources” – were part of this. Each company existed to create returns for shareholders, and if managers failed to do this they should be fired. Every part of the company was seen as a business. Seduced by this view, many organisations started creating “internal markets”. In the 1990s, under director general John Birt, the BBC created a system in which everything from recording studio time to toilet cleaning was traded on a complex internal market. The number of accountants working for the broadcaster exploded, while people who created TV and radio shows were laid off.
As companies have become increasingly ravenous for the latest management fad, they have also become less discerning. Some bizarre recent trends include equine-assisted coaching (“You can lead people, but can you lead a horse?”) and rage rooms (a room where employees can go to take out their frustrations by smashing up office furniture). A century of management fads has created workplaces that are full of empty words and equally empty rituals. Consider a meeting I recently attended. Over an hour, I recorded 64 different nuggets of corporate claptrap. They included familiar favourites such as “doing a deep dive”, “reaching out” and “thought leadership”. There were also some new ones: people with “protected characteristics” (anyone who wasn’t a white straight guy), “the aha effect” (realising something), “getting our friends in the tent” (getting support from others).
How has this obfuscatory way of speaking become so successful? There are a number of explanations. People use management-speak to give the impression of expertise. The inherent vagueness of this language also helps us dodge tough questions. And I came across one further explanation in a short article by the anthropologist David Graeber. As factories in the West have been dismantled, and their work outsourced or replaced with automation, large parts of Western economies have been left with little to do. To be a good citizen in our culture, you need to be a productive citizen. Yet there is less than ever that actually needs to be produced. As Graeber pointed out, the answer has come in the form of what he calls “bullshit jobs”. These are jobs in which people experience their work as “utterly meaningless”. In a Yougov poll conducted in 2015, 37% of respondents in the UK said their job made no meaningful contribution to the world. Yet people working in bullshit jobs need to do something. So bureaucracy has gone rampant: there are more forms to be filled in and procedures to be followed than ever. According to a 2014 survey, the average US employee now spends 45% of their working day doing their real job. The other 55% is spent doing things such as wading through endless emails or attending pointless meetings. Many employees have extended their working day so they can stay late to do their “real work”.
One of the corrosive effects of this working model can be seen in the statistic that 43% of all teachers in England are considering quitting in the next five years. The most frequently cited reasons are increasingly heavy workloads caused by excessive administration, and a lack of time and space to devote to educating students. A similar picture appears if you look at the healthcare sector: in the UK, 81% of senior doctors say they are considering retiring from their job early; 66% of nurses say they would quit if they could; 57% of GPS are considering leaving the profession. In each case, the most frequently cited reason is stress caused by increasing managerial demands.
During the 1980s, when Kroning was in full swing, empty management-speak was confined to the beige meeting rooms of large corporations. Now, it has seeped into every aspect of life. The NHS is crawling with “quality sensei”, “lean ninjas” and “blue-sky thinkers”. Even schools are flooded with the latest business buzzwords like “grit”, “flipped learning” and “mastery”. Naturally, the kids are learning fast. One teacher recalled how a seven-year-old described her day at school: “Well, when we get to class, we get out our books and start on our non-negotiables.”
If we hope to improve organisational life – and the wider impact that organisations have on our society – then a good place to start is by reducing the amount of bullshit our organisations produce. Business bullshit allows us to blather on without saying anything. It empties out language and makes us less able to think clearly and soberly about the real issues. But this does not need to be the case. Each of us can simply refuse to use empty managementspeak. Instead of just rolling our eyes and checking our emails, we should demand something more meaningful.
“A seven-year-old described her day at school: ‘We get out our books and start on our non-negotiables’”