Ignorance isn’t bliss

Have you noticed that there are some seemingly very clever people who appear incredibly stupid?  And how strange it is that certain people get more stupid the more they read. They leaf through the right magazines, the right books and the right online articles and all it does is give them a whole host of phrases they can trot out at will, without having the first idea what they’re talking about.

We are left with a whole generation of pseudo intellectual sheep bleating along with the latest buzz phrase or hot topic.

“Hey John, let’s take a helicopter view of our enterprise skill set?”

“Baaaaa.”

“I like it John, a goal orientated resource repurposing structure is a great idea. I’ll set up some face time.”

“Baaaaa.”

But it’s only the white-collar set that feels the need to hide common sense in a stew of bullshit. You don’t get your local mechanic telling you they’ve had some blue sky thinking and they’re pretty sure your gear box has failed it’s performance management appraisal.  The local fish and chip shop doesn’t ask if you’d like to downsize your cod. So why does business feel the need to wrap everything up in gibberish?

The other day I heard somebody say they that they were trying to humanise analytics. Humanise analytics? What the bloody hell does that mean? Absolutely nothing, that’s what it means. In an act of constructive criticism I immediately set fire to him. Apparently this is wrong, but I was only trying to humanise pyrotechnics! What’s the problem?

So why is there this need to replace original thinking and simple, solid ideas with nonsense? Do we really need to lock ourselves away in the ‘Conception Lab’ to hypothesise about distributed possibilities, or do some empathic research into products suffering from featuritis?

Personally, I would like to see a paradigm shift away from the globalization of knowledge process outsourcing, and a return to a proactive sea change that can only be empowered by traditional out of the box thinking and inevitably lead to a long tail, circle back, next level, state of the art, value added, upstream, win-win scenario.

And I don’t think I can be any clearer than that.