Management-speak is not a speech impediment but an understanding impediment

We hear reports of mismanagement, or poor and inappropriate management behaviour in Macau. Managers may have all the academic credentials, newly polished MBAs, certificates of merit and so on, yet still be poor managers. How can they be improved?

Stories are a powerful way of learning. The psychologist Jerome Bruner writes that we regard “lived time” as a story that has meaning for us, shaping our lives. We make meaning of our lives and think in terms of “storied text” which catches the human condition, our intentions, the vividness and reality of our daily lives.

Stories can be more persuasive and direct than any number of those turgid management texts that gather dust on the library shelves of business schools. In their prizewinning, withering critique, “The Witch Doctors”, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge suggest that management theory is “constitutionally incapable of self-criticism”; “confuses rather than educates”; states the “blindingly obvious”; is un-rigorous and lacks exacting standards; is little more than an indulgence or inflation of its writers’ egos; and simply does not work.

Management theory, they contend, is “an apology for an academic subject, intellectually dead, methodologically sloppy and driven by little more than fashion” while management gurus (the “witch doctors” of the title) are charlatans who charge huge fees for “translating commonsense into grotesque jargon”. And yet business schools thrive on such texts.

Now, would it not be wonderful if, instead, business and management students were to read just a couple of plays by William Shakespeare.

Think of Shakespeare’s “Othello”, the Venetian leader who is naïvely blind to the schemes of his sidekick Iago, whom he has passed over for promotion. Othello is easily duped and unaware of the poisonous yet oh-so-believable words that this disgusting man drips into his ears as he insinuates himself so stealthily into his life.

Othello trusts Iago beyond all reason, and his susceptibility to Iago’s flattering tone and manipulative behaviour, which allows Iago to prey on his weaknesses as a leader – his gullibility, suggestibility and inability to see his own faults – is a lesson to all managers.

Plainly spoken

Or think of “King Lear”, a story of greed, thirst for power, deceit, immense cruelty, corruption, jealousy, betrayal, selfishness, and blindness to the real world. Here we have an ageing king – a leader – who is out of touch with reality, unable to distinguish between the true and the artificial, and over-ready to believe the smooth words of those under him.

Lear tries to bargain for affection, succumbing to the insincere shoe-shining of his two scheming daughters and disinheriting the only daughter who is genuine. He behaves like the paternalistic leader of a kingdom that he regards as his own property, to manipulate at will, but it does not work.

His attempts at command-and-control leadership are thwarted by his own pig-headedness, blindness and the ploys of his entourage. He cannot see his own weaknesses or distinguish between genuine and disingenuous behaviour, and he puts his trust in those who deceive. He rejects the honest people around him and heeds only those that tell him what he wants to hear.

These two plays contain more lessons for management and leadership than piles of management texts. And why would I have managers study them? Because they are about people and principles, conveyed by that most potent medium of learning: a story.

Try remembering management-speak such as: “Our executive board is mission critical in being deeply committed to social responsibility and community service for the empowerment and inclusion of the poor and needy. We promote our corporate synergy policy to incentivise the local citizenry to create out-of-the-box, win-win solutions for the sustainable development of the local community.”

Blah, blah, blah: it is witch-doctor-speak. Now try to remember Lear’s penetrating lines, as he kneels in a tiny, moorland hut during a storm, for the first time in his life thinking about others:

“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these?”

Oh yes, give me managers who have digested Shakespeare rather than regurgitate a diet of vapid management-speak.

This year an English Court of Appeals judge, Lady Justice Hallett, was reported as saying: “Management-speak is not a speech impediment but an understanding impediment.” It is often both.

By Keith Morrison

Author and educationist – kmorrison.iium@gmail.com