Going Nucular Read online

  There was a time when this kind of talk was considered irresponsible by the respectable free-marketeers who were earnestly promoting the virtues of free enterprise over socialism and the welfare state. But after the fall of communism and the freewheeling markets of the nineties, capitalism is back, and free enterprise has started to sound a little musty. It’s gotten to where the word capitalism was probably as frequent inside the ballrooms at the World Economic Forum in New York as it was on the signs of the demonstrators in the street.

  What’s odd is that the right’s reclamation of the word capitalism hasn’t extended to its cousin capitalist. Forbes magazine tried to reclaim that word a while ago when it started billing itself as a “capitalist tool,” but capitalist is still in the closet, at least when used as a job description. People talk about “capitalist societies” or “capitalist economies,” and you can describe somebody as a “venture capitalist,” which really is just a derivative of “venture capital.” But Forbes and the Wall Street Journal don’t ever apply the c-word to people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or Rupert Murdoch. They are investors, entrepreneurs, moguls, or simply businessmen. Reading the business press, you might conclude that America has finally realized the dream of building capitalism without capitalists—that we’re free at last from that rapacious class that once held the economy at its mercy. There’s no one left to blame; as Secretary O’Neill observed, that’s just the way the system works.

  A Good Old-Gentlemanly Vice

  Supposer que la philosophie veut parler du désir des richesses, serait trop absurde.

  —Proust, A l’ombre des jeune filles en fleur, Vol. 1

  The other day I looked at a database of major newspapers to see how often the words greed or greedy occurred near the words corporate , CEO, or executive. Not surprisingly, the total is way up for 2002—more than seven times as great as for the same period last year. And with the threat of a baseball strike looming, the figure would have been higher still if I’d thrown in the phrases baseball players and team owners.

  What’s more interesting, the word greed by itself is a lot more frequent in all contexts this year than last—up almost 50 percent since January. It’s odd for a common word like that to change its frequency so rapidly, particularly when it’s the name of a basic human frailty. Whatever people may like to think, it isn’t as if the amount of greed in the world fluctuates the way the number of school shootings or bankruptcies does.

  But the media give a lot more attention to greed at some times than others, and particularly when the economy is tanking and everybody’s looking for something to blame. When you chart the frequencies of greed and greedy in the press, they turn out to be an almost perfect trailing indicator for the stock market—the worse the Dow is doing, the more the media start talking about greediness. The words declined steadily between 1994 and 2000, and then they shot up again, until they returned to a near-record level this summer, when all the market indexes were at five-year lows. In the press, the summers of greed seem always to follow the winters of our discontent.

  Fresh Air Commentary, August 22, 2002

  It’s striking that the press talks about greed as much as it does. In newspapers, the word is 50 percent more common than envy. That’s very different from what you’d find if you followed ordinary people around with a tape recorder. Greed seems to be a purely public dereliction—it isn’t something we talk about much in daily life. In my household we sometimes throw the adjective greedy around, but only in a jocular way, and more often in reference to pizza than to money—“Don’t get greedy! You already had two slices.” But getting greedy is just a momentary lapse, not a moral condition. And greed isn’t the word that comes to mind when I think about the people I know who seem to take an excessive interest in money and material possessions. I might question their values, but I don’t think of their problem as a sin—it’s more in the line of a having disorder.

  Maybe this is just a matter of perspective. However you define it, greed always comes down to wanting more than your fair share. And at the scale of everyday life, it’s easier to see what counts as more than a fair share of a pizza than more than a fair share of money. In fact I’ll bet most people would have a hard time thinking of themselves as greedy under any circumstances, given that the notion of “a fair share” is wonderfully elastic.

  If it didn’t have its public career to sustain it, greed would probably sound as quaint and biblical as words like sloth and wrath and gluttony do. Or for that matter lust, another word that most people nowadays use only in a jocular way—“I was really lusting after those shoes.” But the fact that we don’t think about greed in everyday settings is exactly what makes it a useful notion to keep around in public life—it’s so remote that we can all denounce it with a clear conscience. People tend to talk about greed as a collective pathology rather than an individual vice. In the press, I’m always running into references to corporate greed and investor greed, to greedy developers and greedy oil companies. But writers rarely use greed and greedy to describe particular people, apart from rapacious movie villains and a couple of poster-child miscreants who have actually been caught dead to rights. Even then, there’s a striking discrepancy: Enron is twenty-five times more likely to be described with greed or greedy than Kenneth Lay is.

  But the remoteness of greed from our private life doesn’t simply make it easy to condemn, it makes it easy to defend. That’s what explains the success of the slogan “greed is good.” That phrase was originally supposed to evoke the audience’s repugnance when Michael Douglas uttered it in the movie Wall Street, taking it in turn from an actual remark of the financier Ivan Boesky. But the champions of the market system have adopted it as a defiant way of praising untrammeled acquisitiveness as the source of economic growth and all the good things it brings with it.

  There’s nothing new about this notion—two hundred years ago, David Hume called avarice “the spur of industry.” It’s hard to imagine anyone fashioning a similar catchphrase for the other deadly sins: “Gluttony is groovy”; “Sloth is splendid.” But then greed is a more conveniently removed vice than the others—you can praise it in the abstract without expecting that anybody is actually going to own up to it. Jack Welch isn’t about to claim in his autobiography that he owes his success to his overweening greed, nor is the guy in the TV repair shop going to crow about the social benefits of greed when he’s explaining why he’s charging you seventy-five bucks to make an estimate. However people try to redeem it, there’s no sin that’s privately more shameful and unlovable than greed, what the poet Matthew Green described as “the sphincter of the heart.”

  The Vision Thing

  There was a picturesque footnote to the Enron affair in the names that the company picked for those offshore corporations that it used to hide its losses, which were drawn from action adventure films like Braveheart, Jurassic Park, and above all the Star Wars movies, which contributed names like Jedi Capital, Obi—1 Holdings, and Kenobe, Inc. In retrospect, those names were clearly a symptom of the space-cadet mentality of the company’s top management. But the fondness for Star Wars imagery isn’t restricted to one rogue outfit in Houston. George Lucas has probably had more influence on the language of corporate America than any other single individual, with Vince Lombardi and Fritz Perls running neck-and-neck for second.

  This has less to do with Lucas’s cinematic imagination than with a problem that has haunted corporate America ever since the early twentieth century, when large corporations definitively replaced the family firm as the dominant economic force. How do you motivate employees to feel a sense of loyalty or commitment to an abstract entity like a corporation? In the words of Peter Drucker, the first and the only great theorist that the corporation has ever had: “An engineer will not be motivated to make a shareholder rich.”

  Fresh Air Commentary, March 25, 2002

  That problem became more urgent about twenty years ago, as corporations started to bail out on the traditional promis
e of lifetime employment, and as the salary gap between employees and top managers began to swell. That’s when corporations and consultants started talking about creating “high-performance corporate cultures.” The term was meant to suggest that purely symbolic rewards and motivations could move employees to feel a loyalty and esprit de corps that went beyond anything that was justified by material considerations alone. Consultants claimed that a company with a strong corporate culture could gain an hour of productive daily work from every employee.

  What made the new conception of “culture” different from old-fashioned “morale” is the way corporations tried to shape it. The fashioning of corporate culture is largely—and often, almost exclusively—a matter of linguistic engineering, as managers try to invest the corporation with the features that inspire loyalty in other walks of life. Writing just after World War II, when the country had come together in a swell of patriotic spirit, Drucker suggested that corporations ought to think of themselves as miniature polities, the representative institutions of society. But modern corporations haven’t found the language of civic engagement a very inspiring model. It’s not stirring enough, for one thing, and it focuses too much on individualism and democratic consensus. However you package it, it’s hard to make a corporation look like anything but an oligarchy.

  At first blush, the military would seem to be a better model. But modern military language sounds more corporate than martial nowadays, with its predilection for acronyms and euphemisms like “collateral damage.” And not even a bank or insurance company would venture to refer to its employees as “assets.”

  What corporations really wanted their employees to feel like was the combatants in medieval romances, setting out on quests in the face of implacable, inhuman enemies and driven by a spiritual sense of mission. That’s what the space operas made their stock-in-trade—Sir Gawain on the holodeck. So it’s no accident that shortly after movies like Star Wars, Star Trek, and Mad Max began to appear, corporations started to loot their language. Salespeople became “road warriors” and the people who shepherd new products and initiatives through development were called “champions.” Above all, that was when corporations started to come up with “vision statements” and “mission statements.” Those were posted on walls or Web sites and printed on wallet-sized cards that employees were expected to carry on their persons at all times, like the sacramental badges called scapulars that the members of monastic fraternities wear under their clothing.

  In the end, these vision statements almost always come down to the same bromides and generalities that have been around for years under the headings of goals and mottoes. “Our vision is to seek long-term growth by providing innovative, high-quality products that create significant value for our customers.” That’s an unimpeachable objective, whether you’re selling eyeglasses or heavy equipment. But thirty years ago, no one would have thought to describe it as a vision, a word that used to be reserved for people like Saint Teresa of Avila.

  Whatever you tell them, of course, most corporate employees aren’t at risk of confusing themselves with Luke Skywalker. In fact the chief effect of all that Star Wars talk about missions and visions has been to exacerbate employees’ sense of disaffection, all the more because it seems to devalue the everyday dedication that most people actually bring to their jobs. In private life it’s enough to have goals and hopes, but when you arrive at the workplace now your eyes are expected to be glistening with some nobler sense of purpose. I recall what a friend told me about having to compose a vision statement for his job: “It isn’t enough that I give them my body—now they want me to kiss them on the mouth.”

  But then the real audience for this language isn’t so much the employees it’s addressed to as the executives who commission it. In an age when successful CEO’s are routinely treated as media stars, top managers no longer model themselves after traditional corporate sages like Alfred Sloan or Thomas Watson. They’d rather think of themselves in the image of General Patton or Captain Kirk, leading their troops into battle as they trail a cloud of rousing metaphors behind them. However dreary or dull your friends may find you, it isn’t hard to think of yourself as a charismatic leader when you’ve got a communications department churning out yards of fulsome panegyric. Not long ago I saw a Xerox Corporation press release that said, “The senior team . . . spontaneously erupted into sustained applause and stood as a sign of respect to their new leader”—language that would have made even a Stalinist apparatchik blush.

  In the end, though, the real victims of this sort of talk aren’t the cynical employees who shine it on but the trusting ones who buy into the story and load up their 401K’s with the company’s stock. And then when the Death Star explodes, the Force is nowhere to be found.

  Initiating Mission-Critical Jargon Reduction

  Asking a business consulting firm to repair the damage business itself has done to the English language may feel a bit like entrusting the school nutrition program to Taco Bell. Nonetheless, since last month almost 100,000 people have downloaded Bullfighter, a free program from Deloitte Consulting that plugs into Microsoft Word and PowerPoint and flags jargon like best of breed and synergies and proposes ordinary English alternatives.

  Over the past twenty years, business has replaced the bureaucracy in the public mind as the chief perpetrator of doublespeak. On the Web, references to corporate or business jargon outnumber references to bureaucratic or government jargon by three to one. It’s a remarkable shift in attitudes, particularly since government hasn’t exactly been sleeping on the job.

  True, complaints about the language of business aren’t new. Critics have long griped about the use of contact as a verb. Back in 1931, a Western Union vice president called the verb “a hideous vulgarism” and banned it from company documents, and H. L. Mencken described it in 1936 as one of the “counter words” of “the heyday of Babbittry.” (The condemnation is repeated in the latest edition of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, which is apparently still holding out for “write, phone, fax, wire, e-mail or click on us.”) And mid—twentieth-century businessmen were ridiculed for inventions like performancewise and depreciationwise—a vogue promoted by Fortune magazine, which Archibald MacLeish once described as “understaffed good-writer-wise.”

  The New York Times Week in Review, August 3, 2003

  Still, it’s hard to get over the impression that where there’s smoke, there’s downsizing. Business jargon may not be new, but it’s more visible and more pervasive in corporate life than it used to be.

  Strategists and consultants bandy clichés like coopetition, low-hanging fruit, and mission-critical, which repackage old concepts in shiny new shrinkwrap. Human resources departments (Mencken would have loved that name) have appropriated the language of the human potential movement to smooth the edges of hierarchy and conflict—“Let’s revisit that issue to align our end-state visions.” Naming consultants churn out high-tech portmanteau names, with an eye to how they will play on Wall Street rather than on the factory floor.

  And then there’s the stiff-gaited swagger of managerial slang. I recall a line from a memo I received on the day I started work at a corporate research lab: “Cascade this to your people and see what the push-back is.” If that sentence were a person, it would walk like George W. Bush.

  It’s tempting to see all this as the sign of an increase in managerial pretension and fatuity. That’s the view according to Dilbert, which depicts the modern office as something like the England of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, where hard-working English-speaking serfs are oppressed by supercilious overlords who speak a foreign tongue. That picture appeals not just to the grunts in the cube-farms, but to their corporate superiors, who find Dilbert’s dimwitted boss as risible as everybody else does.

  In fact Dilbert’s creator, Scott Adams, has made a lucrative sideline out of helping management get its message across. In his consulting capacity, Dilbert has enabled Honda of America to “develop the key message [that]
quality is a core value” and helped Xerox to invest employees with the “sense of ownership” that comes from an “empowering work environment.”

  That’s the curious thing about corporate jargon—everyone deplores it, but nobody can resist it. The Deloitte division that developed BullFighter promises “thought-leading research” that “empowers global enterprises.” A promotional brochure from a large British law firm offers its clients “tax compliance advice which is effective, clear and jargon-free,” and continues: “Our approach is proactive. We also believe that tax rules can play a positive role in incentivizing investors.”

  Reading that, you’re struck less by its pretension than by its ingenuousness—it reminds you of Molière’s M. Jordain, who was astonished to learn he had been speaking prose all his life. But blaming the proliferation of business cant on an increase in phoniness is like blaming the recent corporate scandals on a sudden uptick in greed. Both are the outgrowths of the changing nature of the corporation itself. If there’s an invisible hand that moves the market, there sometimes seems to be an invisible mouth that speaks for it.