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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newspaper.
This time of year many of us look back on the past 12 months, complaining that we didn’t achieve more and aim to be more productive. However, I am beginning to wonder if individuals see the biggest obstacles to our effectiveness. It feels like time is increasing because of things beyond our control: consistency, the “computer says no” system, and the power of verbiage.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological advances would enable his descendants to work 15 hours a week. Instead, we seem to be busier than ever. Keynes didn’t mind the computerized call center menus that tell us at length how our data will be processed, and encouraged us to try the website, what we have, otherwise why would we have taken the call to enter the sixth ring. hell?
Nor did he foresee the proliferation of words and phrases that seem to be the hallmark of the 21st century. In the UK, the average FTSE 100 annual report now has more pages than a Charles Dickens novel. In the US, ESG reports from the S&P 500 have increased for the fifth time in three years. Board packages have also expanded: on average 226 pages in length. Most board directors in the US and UK told the survey that packages have little or no impact on understanding the business.
Instead, I suggest reading Watson and Crick’s 1953 paper describing the molecular structure of DNA. It is only a few pages long. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which moved the nation, was 10 sentences long. Both are shorter than the introductions to most reports on my desk. Here’s a line from one that I recently picked up: “lack of absorptive capacity can become a significant barrier to continuous innovation”. The report was written by a consulting firm about – er – production.
While sitting in a restaurant in Massachusetts a few months ago I tried not to listen to a woman on a long phone call about whether her presentation should say “key learning objectives” or “results of involved”. Last week in London, I saw a friend who had been asked to give advice to a Whitehall department, only to find that the two-page letter he had sent in advance had been altered by the authorities. described as a “word salad” that took most of the meeting to explain.
How did we create a group of people who write gobbledegook? How will we cope when AI models are trained on it, producing even more gibberish? Management consultants are partly to blame. When I started my career at McKinsey many years ago, we were taught pithy words that made it clear: “Winning fast” was one. These days, many advisors’ reports are being drowned out, perhaps to bridge the gap in thinking – or to justify a higher fee. However, even those who charge by the hour don’t want to read these things. An excellent experiment by the American lawyer, Joseph Kimble, found that lawyers do not like to be complicated like everyone else. When Kimble sent two versions of the court’s verdict to 700 lawyers, they chose to understand the matter more.
“The more you write, the less people understand”. Those are the words of wisdom from a UK government policy book that encourages officials to write short sentences, in plain English. Unfortunately, the message is lost. Some parts of the public sector are examples of action – I recently reported the death of an elderly relative in “Tell Us Once” service. which conveys news of bereavement throughout the system – but others are bastions of jargon. A draft agreement for architects wishing to bid for construction contracts with three London councils asks potential applicants, among other otiose questions, whether they will “consider the value of the partnership of the community, and the strategies (a) they will use to support customers to increase the value of the community in collaboration with the stakeholders”.
It is said, another purpose of this document is to encourage small firms to apply for construction work. However, they will be the ones who try to produce enough word answers to meet the standards.
I am reminded Bullshit Jobs: Theoryby anthropologist David Graeber, who argued that about a third of today’s jobs are worthless, just doing work for other people. These included “Taskmasters”: middle managers who do unnecessary work; and “goons” — lobbyists and salespeople who try to sell things that nobody needs or wants. Graeber’s thesis had a great response – many wrote to admit that they themselves had a masterpiece, and they were sad.
Verbosity – or what former Chief Justice Igor Judge called “the anxious game of knowledge” – hurts us. No one wants to be invited to an “idea meeting”.
In the book by Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxythe problem of bullshit jobs was solved, on the planet Golgafrincham, by sending all the marketing consultants to colonize the new planet. On Planet Earth, maybe corporations can start directing all the people who create useless complexity to useful jobs. It can reduce our blood pressure, save time and even solve labor shortages. As for me, I will make the Plain English Campaign one of my 2025 charities.
