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Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
At this time of year many of us look back on the past 12 months, blame ourselves for not achieving more and resolve to be more productive. I’m beginning to wonder, though, if individuals are really the biggest obstacle to our own efficiency. It seems as if more and more time is being soaked up by things beyond our control: consent, “computers don’t say” systems, and the power of verbiage.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological progress would enable his grandchildren to work 15 hours a week. Instead, we seem busier than ever. Keynes explained at length how our data would be handled in the computerized call center menu and urged us to try the website, which of course we have, otherwise why would we have entered the sixth circle on the phone? Hell?
Nor did he foresee the proliferation of words and jargon that seem to characterize the 21st century. In the UK, the average FTSE 100 annual report now contains more pages than a Charles Dickens novel. In the US, the ESG report from the S&P 500 saw its fifth increase in three years. Board packs have also expanded: an average of 226 pages long A majority of board directors in both the US and the UK said in the survey that packs had little impact or proved a barrier to business understanding.
Instead, I recommend reading the 1953 paper by Watson and Crick that describes the molecular structure of DNA. It’s only a few pages long. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which moved a nation, had 10 sentences. Both are shorter than most report roles on my desk. I just picked up a line from one: “Lack of absorptive capacity can easily become a critical barrier to continuous innovation”. The report is about – of – a consulting firm Productivity.
A few months ago I sat in a cafe in Massachusetts trying not to listen to a woman on a long call about whether she should call her presentation “Key Learning Objectives” or “Stakeholder Outcomes.” In London last week, I saw a friend who had been asked to advise a Whitehall department, only to find that the two-page note he had sent in advance had been turned into what officials described as a “word salad”. That took most of the meeting to decipher.
How did we create a nation that writes gobblegogs? How do we cope when AI models are trained on it, creating more and more obscenities? Management consultants are partly responsible. When I started my career at McKinsey many years ago, we were taught catchphrases that defined: “quick wins” were one. These days, many consultant reports are drowning in prolixity, perhaps to cover thought gaps — or to justify higher fees. Yet people who charge by the hour don’t actually want to read this stuff. A surprising experiment by Joseph Kimble, an American attorney, showed that lawyers dislike complications like everyone else. When Kimball sent two versions of the court’s ruling to 700 lawyers, they overwhelmingly preferred the more understandable version.
“When you write more, people understand less” is the sage maxim of a UK government design manual that urges officials to write short sentences in plain English. Unfortunately, the message is getting lost. Some parts of the public sector are models of efficiency — I have just reported the death of an elderly relative “Tell us once” service That sends a mournful tidings throughout the system — but others are fortresses of sound. A framework contract for architects wishing to bid for building contracts with London’s three councils asks potential applicants, among other idiosyncratic questions, how they will “conceive and implement collaborative social value? [they] Will implement to support clients to maximize social value returns through collaboration with stakeholders”.
Supposedly, one purpose of this document is to encourage smaller firms to bid for building work. Yet they will be most stretched in an attempt to produce sufficient lexical responses to meet criteria.
I am reminded The Bullshit Job: A TheoryBy anthropologist David Graeber, who argued that about a third of modern work is meaningless, and simply works for other people. These include “taskmasters”: middle managers who create tasks that are not needed; And “bullies” – lobbyists and marketers who try to sell things that no one needs or wants. Graeber’s thesis received a huge response – many wrote to admit that they themselves had done a dirty job and were miserable.
Verbatim—or what former Lord Chief Justice Igor Judge used to call the “anxiety parade of knowledge”—makes us miserable. No one wants to be invited to an “idea session.”
In the novel by Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the GalaxyOn the planet Golgafrincham, the bad work problem was solved by sending all the marketing consultants to colonize a new planet. On Planet Earth, perhaps organizations can start moving all the people who create pointless complications into roles that are useful. It can lower our blood pressure, save time and even solve labor shortages. As for me, I am going to do a plain English campaign for 2025 among my charities.
