Ron Rosenbaum writes a very interesting story in the NYObserver about management-consultant bullshit taking over journalism. He says it may have created the atmostphere where USAToday star reporter Jack Kelley could print lies for a decade. The connection between management-consultanting and Jack Kelley himself is pretty vague, but I find very believable the overall point that this new mindset will tend to degrade journalism and make it into just another product. When people stop thinking about what they're doing as having a higher value--a value to themselves, their colleagues, their discipline, and the world at large--it makes it more likely they will use it for a quick buck. Like Enron.
(Over the long haul, this will also be bad for business: treating your product like it answers to "a higher authority" is how you really develop a strong long-term brand, which is what companies should really be doing. But once you start thinking of it as a brand, you may be in a little more danger of losing the long-term vision.)
There have been several tip-offs that the management-consultant culture is an unacknowledged, uninvestigated factor in the past year of newspaper scandals. First there was the egregious language of the USA Today publisher, (Craig Moon)—who, after accepting the resignation of a top editor over the Jack Kelley scandal, issued the reassurance that this "opens the door to move the USA Today brand forward under new leadership."There seemed to be no understanding that calling a newspaper a "brand" moves things backwards to precisely the thinking that allowed Jack Kelley to thrive—protected because he was the public face of a "brand," not a newspaperman whose facts are subject to review...
At this particular retreat, Mr. Raines tells us, the "coach and facilitator" announced the lesson for the day: "how to fire people." The poor Times execs were coerced into dividing up into groups to role-play firing scenarios Or, as Mr. Raines puts it, the groups "practiced termination interviews."
Note: "termination interviews." Don’tcha love it? It’s hard to decide which is more absurd, the invention and use of that Orwellian euphemism, or the attempt to foist it on people whose business is supposed to be the honest use of words.[Emphasis mine.]
I particularly like Rosenbaum's point about Orwellian language. But I think this piece points out how our culture could be moving one step closer to Brave New World, which I consider a greater threat than 1984.
Rosenbaum, of course, is not the first to notice and comment on the spread of consultant speak. Australian historian and author Don Watson recently wrote a book called Death Sentence on the infection of business language into many other parts of life. (A particularly scary quote from Watson on this newspeak: "It's incapable of carrying an emotion. It is the language equivalent of the assembly line. It turns human processes into mechanical ones.")
And in most ironic fashion, Deloitte, one of the biggest management companies, has created a program called Bullfighter to try to get its employees to stop speaking like consultants.
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