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FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
This time of year, many of us look back at the past 12 months, beat ourselves up for not achieving more, and resolve to be more productive. I’m beginning to wonder, however, if individuals are really the biggest obstacles to our own efficiency. It feels like more and more time is being absorbed by things beyond our control: compliance, “computer says no” systems, and the forces of lip service.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological advances would allow his grandchildren to work 15 hours a week. Instead, we seem busier than ever. Keynes didn’t have computerized call center menus telling us in detail how our data would be handled and urging us to try the website, which of course we did, otherwise why would we have picked up the phone to get into the website? sixth circle of hell?
Nor did he foresee the proliferation of words and slang that seems to be a hallmark of the 21st century. In the UK, the average FTSE 100 annual report now contains more pages than a Charles Dickens novel. In the United States, S&P 500 ESG reporting has grown by a fifth in three years. Board packs have also expanded: the average is 226 pages. Most board directors in both the United States and the United Kingdom have said in surveys that the packages have little impact or are a barrier to understanding the business.
Instead, I suggest reading Watson and Crick’s 1953 paper describing the molecular structure of DNA. It has only a few pages. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech, which moved a nation, consisted of 10 sentences. Both are shorter than the introductions to most reports on my desk. Here is a sentence I just read: “lack of absorptive capacity can easily become a critical bottleneck to continuous innovation.” The report is from a consulting company on… ahem… productivity.
Sitting in a coffee shop in Massachusetts a few months ago I tried not to listen to a woman on a long call about whether her presentation should say “key learning objectives” or “stakeholder outcomes.” Last week in London, I saw a friend who had been asked to give advice to a Whitehall department, only to discover that officials had turned the two-page note she had sent in advance into what she described as a “word salad.” which took most of the meeting to decipher.
How have we generated a caste of people who write gibberish? How will we deal with this when training AI models, which will produce even more gibberish? Management consultants are partly to blame. When I started my career at McKinsey many years ago, we were taught pithy, clarifying phrases: “Quick wins” was one of them. Many consultant reports today are drowning in prolixity, perhaps to fill a gap in thinking or justify a higher fee. However, even those who charge by the hour do not want to read this material. A wonderful experiment by an American lawyer, Joseph Kimble, discovered that lawyers don’t like complexity as much as everyone else. When Kimble sent two versions of a court ruling to 700 lawyers, they overwhelmingly preferred the understandable version.
“When you write more, people understand less.” Those are the wise words from a UK government design manual that urges civil servants to write shorter sentences, in plain English. Unfortunately, the message is being lost. Some parts of the public sector are models of efficiency: I have just reported the death of an elderly relative to “Tell us once” service that broadcast news of a duel to the entire system, but others are bastions of jargon. A framework agreement for architects wishing to tender for construction contracts with three London councils asks potential applicants, among other useless questions, how they will “conceptualize collaborative social value and what strategies [they] will be implemented to help clients maximize social value returns through collaboration with stakeholders.”
Supposedly, one of the goals of this document is to encourage small businesses to bid for construction work. However, they will be the most demanding when it comes to trying to generate responses that are detailed enough to meet the criteria.
I remember Bullshit jobs: a theoryby anthropologist David Graeber, who argued that about a third of modern jobs are meaningless and simply create work for other people. Among them were the “Taskmasters”: middle managers who create work that is not necessary; and “bullies”: lobbyists and marketers who try to sell things no one needs or wants. Graeber’s thesis had a great response: many wrote to admit that they themselves had a shitty job and were miserable.
Verbosity – or what former Chief Justice Igor Judge used to call the “distressing parade of knowledge” – makes us miserable. No one wants to be invited to an “ideas session.”
In the novel by Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxythe shitty jobs problem was solved, on the planet Golgafrincham, by sending all the marketing consultants to colonize a new planet. On Planet Earth, perhaps organizations could start moving all the people who create useless complexities into roles that are useful. It could lower our blood pressure, save time, and even solve labor shortages. As for me, I will be making the Plain English Campaign one of my charities for 2025.