Darwin Calling a Spade a Strategy

"A friend in the consulting business sends a note to assure me that his efforts are “further than expected on our top down estimate, which will make it much easier to identify gaps during our bottom up planning.” I’m relieved. At least, I think I’m relieved. It’s hard to tell if the identification of gaps during bottom up planning is goods news or bad news. And that, I suspect, is the point. Chalk up another victory for buanguage, the business-language of the modern manager.

Every culture manufactures its own language. Drug dealers, seventh-graders, physicians, they all have their secret handshakes and codes, intended in most cases to let others know that they are members of the club. But few cultures have poured it on thicker than have the enlightened business consultants and managers working in the age of innovation, agility, change agents, paradigm shifts and lots of other words whose recently innovated meaning has never been clear to me."

redux [11.13.00]
The Boston Globe Downturn dictionary

"The weather in the tech sector is changing, and so are the words we choose to describe it."

"''People were using the language of revolution over the past few years: `We're going to change the way you do business.' Now, a lot of the most visionary talk about technology has disappeared, in part because a lot of the magazines that carried it don't exist anymore. There's a sense that hype itself engenders a kind of suspicion, and people are a little bit more skeptical.''

So how is tech talk different today?"

redux [07.13.00]
Business 2.0 Semantics of the New Economy

"The struggle over monetizing the digital economy is now a war, if we follow the rhetoric of its leaders. The battle over music and movies is inspiring Charlton Heston-like images, most recently from Edgar Bronfman, head of Universal Studios (whose last widely distributed quote came years ago when he declared the Internet the "CB radio of the "90s"), in a speech at Real Conference 2000 in May."

""I am warring against the culture of the Internet, threatening to depopulate Silicon Valley as I move a Roman legion or two of Wall Street lawyers to litigate in Bellevue and San Jose," Bronfman said. "I have moved these lawyers - not to attack the Internet and its culture, but for its benefit and to protect it."

Bronfman justified his fight as defense of his "intellectual property rights," and those of creators everywhere. "You own a home. You own a car. They're yours - they belong to you. Well, your ideas belong to you, too. And "intellectual property" is property, period." In pursuit of pirates, he said, "we must restrict the anonymity behind which people hide."

"The semantics of the issues intrigue me, and came to my attention through Richard Stallman, who suggests that terminology is a foundation for our ideas, and that words such as consumer, protection, piracy, and intellectual property reinforce faulty premises."

redux [04.21.00]
George Lakoff The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System

"The way ordinary people deal implicitly with the limitations of any one metaphor is by having many metaphors for comprehending different aspects of the same concept. As we saw, people in our culture have many different metaphors for IDEAS and the MIND, some of which are elaborate in one or another branch of Psychology and some of which are not. These clusters of metaphors serve the purpose of understanding better than any single metaphor could-even though they are partial and very often inconsistent with each other."

"If Cognitive Science is to be concerned wtih human understanding in its full richness, and not merely with those phenomena that fit the MIND IS A MACHINE metaphor, then it may have to sacrifice metaphorical consistency in the service of fuller understanding."