Straight Talk on Mahogany Row

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One of Tyler Cowen’s readers asks:

Why does the corporate world use language so inefficiently? Why turn a simple thing like “talking to a client about their needs” into a five-step process (distinguished, no doubt, by an acronym)? Do companies think that they create net value when they brand a common thing like human conversation as a one-of-a-kind, complex process — even after the costs of being opaque, jargonistic, and long-winded are taken into account?

Tyler’s answer:

My speculation: People disagree in corporations, often virulently, or they would disagree if enough real debates were allowed to reach the surface. The use of broad generalities, in rhetoric, masks such potential disagreements and helps maintain corporate order and authority. Since it is hard to oppose fluffy generalities in any very specific way, a common strategy is to stack everyone’s opinion or points into an incoherent whole. Disagreement is then less likely to become a focal point within the corporation and warring coalitions are less likely to form.

This is an unanswerable question, but I think I’d offer a different kind of speculation. For starters, all professions develop their own jargon. Some of it sounds ridiculous and some of it doesn’t, but it seems to be practically a human universal. So I wouldn’t try to draw any special conclusions strictly from the existence of jargon itself.

More generally, though, why does an entire class that thinks of itself as so practical and results-oriented buy into so many of the fads that produce all this jargon? I don’t think it’s to reduce conflict. I would be very surprised if you found any correlation at all between faddish jargon and the amount of internal backstabbing in corporations. Instead, my guess is this: most businessmen aren’t really all that smart. When things go wrong they don’t know what to do. And when you don’t know what to do, anything is better than nothing. So you go searching for someone with an answer, and like all professions, the business world has plenty of people willing to offer them. Needless to say, though, those answers have to seem as if they offer something new and different, and that means flowcharts and five-point plans and a special lingo. It’s a truism that the easiest person to sell to is another salesman, and likewise, the easiest person to sell a new business process fad to is another businessman.

And for what it’s worth, I don’t think this is entirely bad. I know a lot of this stuff sounds ridiculous, but if you dig beneath the jargon a lot of business advice is actually fairly reasonable. What’s more, in a lot of cases it almost doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is that you have some corporate managers who are at sea and don’t know what to do, and they just need someone to provide them with some structure for changing things and moving forward. Not every structure will work, but I think you might be surprised by how many different ones do. What really matters is simply deciding on something and then getting a move on. A charismatic and self-confident CEO is supposed to provide this kind of leadership, but lacking that a little bit of witch doctory business process consulting can often help the process along.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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