There were two heady moments during 2007 when it seemed that the bull market in management nonsense, which has been on the rampage for as long as I can remember, might be flagging. In the middle of May a reader forwarded me the following internal e-mail. "Who Moved My Cheese?™ Change Management Workshop has been cancelled due to insufficient numbers."
Could this be, I wondered, a sign that sense was taking over? I waited patiently, and in December was finally rewarded.
In the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review was a story called "Breakthrough thinking from inside the box". This was really exciting. Thinking outside the box is the oldest and lamest management cliche of them all. I never really understood what the box was, or what was so good about being outside it.
The fact that the HBR has decided, after careful deliberation, that it is better to be inside the box is splendid news. The box and the cancellation aside, 2007 was otherwise the silliest year since I started being interested in these things. Real life became so much dafter than spoof that by the end of the year the satirical columnist Martin Lukes found himself out of a job and in a police cell. In his honour, though, I have named two categories after him in my annual management twaddle awards, which I am awarding today.
The first new prize is the Martin Lukes 120 per cent award. This is for hyperbole and for failure to grasp the basic laws of mathematics. The outright winner is Liverpool Council, which banned local people from smoking in their own homes when council staff came to call. A spokesman told the BBC: "I am one million per cent confident the people of this city will respond in a positive manner."
The next award is the Martin Lukes Creovation award. This is for combining two good words to make one bad one. The overall quality of entries in this category was excellent. After much debate, bronze goes to IBM Global Services for coming up with the "flex-pon-sive company". The silver award goes to the European Council for urging member states to adopt a "Flexicurity approach" to policy. But the gold award goes to Eversheds which is looking for trainee lawyers who are knowlivators (knowledgeable motivators), proactilopers (proactive developers) and five other clumping concepts that sound more like dinosaurs than legal eagles.
A third new category is the Try-Hard Award, given to the company that strives most heroically to be fashionable. The clear winner is ABN Amro, which in February invited all employees to join a "staff island" on the bank's virtual HQ on Second Life and hold meetings with each other. Just in case this interferes with the real meetings they might be holding, the bank has warned that this must be done on home computers only. The idea being that bankers now have such dismal first lives at home that a second life in which they pretend to be in the office is preferable.
The award for the worst e-mail sign-off had two finalists: "Have a sparkling day" and "Pax". The first is grim: reading it makes the day lose any lustre it might have had, but the prize goes to Pax for its horrible, pretentious, classical one-upmanship.
Next, the award for the finest grammatical mangling. In previous years nouns have picked up prizes for pretending to be verbs. This year special mention goes to those that acquired a "re" in front of them: to "repurpose", to "reposition" and to "retask". Second prize is won jointly by "decisioning", "professionalising", and "architectured", which respectively mean deciding, no idea and built. First prize goes to "activations", which are what were formally called actions, but are now longer and more exciting.
The grim holiday greetings award is won hands down by the president of Quazar Capital in Minneapolis. He sent his annual letter to all sorts of people he has never met, instructing them to: "Thank a service person who is risking their lives so that we can enjoy our freedoms." He then tells them his granddaughter dressed up as a Viking at Halloween and that his Mom and Dad went to South Dakota on holiday, drank wine and reminisced on "life changes". Finally he comments on M&A activity and begs for business. The "key takeaway" here: if you are going to tell clients about your private life (which for an investment banker is not a good idea) better to make it a bit more interesting.
And finally, the top team-bonding award. This was as hotly contested as ever. While Martin Lukes and his team were merely playing golf, real managers were scrubbing the teeth of pygmy hippos and being stand-up comics. Yet by far the best - or worst - bonding exercise took place at the BBC. Its senior journalists and presenters were made to cuddle plastic baby dolls that screamed, and then walk barefoot through raspberry jelly and finally to wash the jam off each other's feet. The point to this exercise - which sounds like a kinky sex game gone awry - was presumably to make members of staff feel so embarrassed that they resigned - thus helping the corporation towards its target of losing several thousand people. - ( Financial Times service)
