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| Leads, follow, or take a break |
If you are really looking for me to break a 2X4 over the back of your head then walk around spewing out macho corporate clichés like “Don’t react t to a problem, be PRO-active.” Most of these silly utterances don’t even make sense even though they are parroted by every Harvard MBA and Denny’s night shift manager in the country.
I was leafing through a copy of a slick corporate culture magazine (Fast Company) the other day when I came across an article about some CEO who is training for a bicycle race. When asked about his training he replied, “Failure in not an option.” I swear he actually said that without any irony or sarcasm. With tough words like those you would think he was talking about taking out a Nazi machine gun nest. I'm afraid failure is an option, just ask about 180 cyclists sucking Lance Armstrong's wheel in this year's Tour de France.
You have to sort of pity this poor slob who has obviously seen to many Arnold movies and thinks that a pithy little aside like “Failure is not an option” is actually communication. If I would have read further I’m sure he would have said something about giving it “110 %.” That is one of my least favorite corporate sayings because it implies that the person was too stupid to know the true capacity if he miscalculated by 10% as 110% just isn't possible (That's why we have percentages in the first place).
There is no ‘I’ in team, unless you are speaking French, in which case there is an ‘I’ in team (equipe). This adage gets at the heart of corporate speak—a crypto-language of dumb sports metaphors. Corporate types love sports metaphors because in athletics it is easy to see who to emulate. This is also why corporate types hate art and artists. Art is often ambiguous and recondite. Art tries to imitate life; life is rarely about black and white; life is almost never about things being completely good or evil; life is subtle. Subtle is a very hard sell.
Corporate types also love analogies to warfare. I’m sure Wall Street is full of guys who quote Sun Tsu verbatim while they make double sure the doors to their Lexus are locked whenever a scruffy teenager walks past them at a light. Corporate speak is about sounding tough; it’s about sounding decisive; it’s about having a “can do attitude.” Let’s face it, if your job is about selling bottled water how tough do you really need to be? I’m thinking that you don’t need to be tough at all.
Maybe I need to be part of the solution instead of being part of the problem. Maybe I’m not being a team player. Maybe I need to improve my fluency in corporate speak if I am ever going to get anywhere in this world of big business.
