The English language is under constant assault by people writing about management. Ideas are expressed imprecisely, because the writers cannot get the words right. Sloppy writing then encourages and ultimately guarantees sloppy thinking.

We cannot afford to put up with this. The study of strategic management in both the private and public sectors makes slow progress because too often we do not know what writers are saying, because they do not either. They include consultants and academics, and their friends inside organisations, especially in human resources and planning roles, the priesthood, the nomenclature of management theory.

There is an increasing demand for exciting words, because managers and consultants urge the need for more and more formal documents, such as mission statements, visions, statements of values, and so on. Many tell us merely that the organisation values truth and integrity and aims to delight the customer. The last area left for seeking competitive advantage lies in finding more extravagant ways of claiming to be quite good.

These documents are not written so much as assembled. Their authors have simply pulled some worn words and phrases out of a box, and pushed them together into Lego sentences.

The building blocks are well known because they are so frequently repeated. Innovation; rapidly changing competitive environment; delivering shareholder value; leading edge; driving change strategies; a holistic global perspective; capturing transparency from the internal market; paradigm shift, and so on and on. These pre-fabricated expressions have lost all meaning.

For many practitioners the Lego words have two wonderful values. First, they are safe, because they are used by lots of other people. Nobody gets sacked for writing nonsense, provided it is nonsense already in wide circulation. And second, they mean that a writer does not have to think. It is possible to take fistfuls of these terms, and slot them together to produce a document which looks like other ones.

These prefabricated, modular words and phrases have insidious powers of their own, however, because they appear to be helpful, but they occupy your mind, and destroy your ability to think. You will be unable to express a new idea, because there are not yet any pre-fabricated terms for it, and you have lost the skill of choosing the words to match your meaning. All that you will say is what the Lego words allow you to say.

This is seen in the landscape oriented slide, with its list of bullet points. The format removes the obligation to show any connection between the points, the consistent development of an argument. There is room for only a few words, so Lego language is compulsory. Anything from the stock of pre-fabricated phrases will have some approximate validity.

The word spin has become so widely used because there is a real need for a word to describe one characteristic of our shameless times. In this kind of management language reality does not matter, but talking about it does.

The map is lost

We need some leadership brave enough to condemn the nonsense. But society’s old sources of authority have gone. The absence of social and political governing ideas leaves people looking over their shoulders for guidance from amoral brand consultants and spin advisors. We enter the new millennium knowing that we have the science and technology to do almost anything. But we have lost our map of what we should do, and why we should do it.

The management writers are as adrift as anyone else. The extravagant language is used to conceal the fact that too many management writers do not have very much that is worth saying. They have no social goal, apart from having everybody increase the rate of consumption of transient goods and services and passing minor excitements.

Their advice to managers is about techniques and processes. Management presentations and books are fashionable and ephemeral disposable consumer goods which are not meant to be remembered or re-read, but only to make a brief impact.

The issue is not simply caring for the purity of English. It is about thinking well enough to be able to cope with the problems and opportunities of organisations and government.

Unhappily for us, management Lego language is increasingly the international language of the people in businesses, the civil service, governments, international bodies, and NGOs who will make inept decisions because they think dead thoughts in a dead language.

As individuals we are not entirely helpless. We can take special care to watch our own expression.

The other thing we can do is to stop putting up with the debased language of those who inflict so much of this stuff on us. We should draw attention to it, point at it, declare it unfit for purpose and assert that it disqualifies the perpetrator from deserving our attention.