Karl Marx's Turnkey Solution - Industry Trend or Event

Industry Standard, The, Oct 16, 2000 by Thomas Frank

Why we should pay a little more attention to all that stupid jargon.

We all know that the corporate world is awash in silly jargon. We roar when Dilbert mocks the theory-deluded boss. We smite knowingly when an advertiser advances the cause of some snack product by puncturing the pretensions of a pompous guru. We chortle at "paradigm shifts" and "turnkey solutions." We snicker for a while and then we forget about it, imagining our critical duties done.

And we are not surprised when we hear that some company's market cap has vaulted beyond that of U.S. Steel on the strength of a faddish business plan; we nod respectfully when a leading corporate raider demands that we call him a "corporate activist" or when a writer lists the ways in which a "brand community" is superior to a community community.

We make fun of jargon, but jargon has power. The new economy, as we are so frequently told, is as much about ideas as it s about new economic arrangements and new technologies. It is an economy built n persuasion, on brands, on "thin air," as one ecstatic recent British book has it. More than ever, we rely on words -- and the ideas they contain -- to guide our decisions, to understand what is going on.

Unfortunately, even as ideas become more important, we believe increasingly that the language used to describe them is meaningless.

It is an explosive combination: Ideas are the key to wealth; ideas are essentially beyond our understanding. With our cynicism about business language, we have made ourselves uniquely vulnerable to intellectual hustlers, to slick purveyors of jargon and dealers in bad ideas.

And though it's easy to laugh at a too-earnest management "evangelist" or a collapsed pyramid scheme in the rural Midwest, we live in a world in which we have all felt the effects of bad ideas; have seen colleagues believe and internalize them; have seen our leaders make political decisions according to them; have seen people we know resign themselves to extra-long work days and lousy pay because of them; have seen powerful executives disrupt Lives and the flow of resources to get into step with some crackpot notion they half-heard one day on CNBC.

I offer as Exhibit A in this indictment of sloppy language the robust recrudescence of one of the most odious bits of intellectual demagoguery ever to mar the American experience: red-baiting.

That the new economy has anything to do with red-baiting seems odd at first. We all know to stay away from it: Short of racism, it is just about the most transparent appeal to senseless prejudice that we know of. But if you thought you'd seen the last of the Red Menace menace, think again.

Granted, nobody's calling for a blacklist these days. But intellectually the hustle remains the same: A writer or thinker discredits ordinary American movements and institutions by associating them in some far-fetched manner with the most loathsome regime in recent memory.

Typical of the new approach is Walter Wriston's 1992 new-economy manifesto, The Twilight of Sovereignty, in which the distinction between the Soviet Union and the American regulatory state was simply collapsed into the universal category of "governments," entities that were said to act everywhere according to the same nefarious set of impulses to "impose rules and exact payments." Six years later, Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw parroted this idea in their 1998 bestseller The Commanding Heights, asserting that the politics of the last hundred years were best understood as a grand battle between faith in markets and faith in "government," be it democratic, Stalinist or whatever.

It was in the jargon-littered playground of management theory, however, that this tendency to find crypto-Soviet beliefs lurking everywhere came to its full fruition.

What will surprise readers unfamiliar with the field are the people and organizations that the Young Turks of management theory have seen fit to compare to the Commies of old: the great American bluechip corporations. The fact that Dow Chemical, General Motors, IBM, McDonnell-Douglas and others had all been stout Cold Warriors would be of no avail in the free-market cauldron of the 1990s. No, what we "[earned" from the Soviet Union's demise was that the big, "vertically integrated" corporation was doomed.

In his massive 1992 volume Liberation Management, Tom Peters did his best to transform this preposterous logic into the wisdom of the ages: What united communism and the traditional corporate model, it occurred to him, was arrogance. After all, he wrote, wasn't the traditional American corporation, just like the recently collapsed "totalitarian states," simply "a hubristic exercise in 'controlling everything that exists?'"

Peters went on to draw an explicit parallel between the USSR and IBM (then a favorite "old-economy" punching bag), and asserted that "most [American] companies, like the old Soviet economy, are still guided by comprehensible master plans that shrivel the human spirit [and] delay useful signals."