Adam Smith Institute

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We have a useful solution to this business, err, horse puckey

Given the delicacy and refinement that we so pride ourselves upon here we might prefer to use horse puckey but there's no doubt that there's a certain directness and vibrancy to The Guardian's phrasing:

From inboxing to thought showers: how business bullshit took over

No one with any experience of modern capitalism would disagree with the underlying idea. We all know that by the time any organisation has a Human Resources department (rather than one bod in a corner just checking the legality of employment contracts) there's going to be floods, great tsunamis, of the latest cod nonsense flowing through the system. What we desire, of course, is some method of divining which is useful such and which isn't - something subject to Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is, well, that horse puckey.

Fortunately, we do, those markets in which modern capitalism is embedded. The proof being:

Although Kroning may have been killed off, Kronese has lived on. The indecipherable management-speak of which Charles Krone was an early proponent seems to have infected the entire world. These days, Krone’s gobbledygook seems relatively benign compared to much of the vacuous language circulating in the emails and meeting rooms of corporations, government agencies and NGOs.

Those agencies and NGOs are not subject to market pressures. The corporations are. Get too much up the bovine cloaca here and the business will go bankrupt. As C. Northcote Parkinson pointed out well over half a century ago the others will find that greater attention paid to such things brings an increase in budgets.

It might be true - sadly so - that there is no method of preventing the puckey takeover. That just means that we need to wipe out those organisations so affected - now all we've got to do is apply this rigorously, to those organisations which don't already face those market pressures which do that very job for us.