Chief execs should learn the art of oratory
By Michael Skapinker
Published: January 29 2008 02:00 | Last updated: January 29 2008 02:00
There are so many lawyers crammed into London's International Dispute Resolution Centre that there is almost no room for anyone else.
Seventy of them are taking part in the proceedings over how much Britain's banks should be allowed to charge customers for unauthorised overdrafts. For anyone interested in how the English Bar's biggest names perform, this is clearly the place.
My interest had been piqued by a reader's comment on my column three weeks ago about how many more lawyers than MBAs were running for US president. The reader said the cut-and-thrust of the courtroom was better preparation for the political hustings than the daily life of a chief executive, who does not get enough practice speaking.
Is this true? Chief executives make dozens of speeches a year and address small groups daily. As for the liveliness of the courtroom, I recall a school careers adviser warning those with lawyerly ambitions that if we pictured ourselves moving juries to tears with our eloquence, we were in for a disappointment. I have since spent enough tedious days reporting from court to vouch for the truth of this, but I thought I should take another look.
What I had forgotten about English courts is how much time is spent finding the right page. Mr Justice Andrew Smith wrestles with the files in front of him, searching for footnote 19. Where is it? "Page 13 of bundle E, my lord," says Iain Milligan QC, representing Barclays.
Another document defeats the judge entirely. "I'm sorry, I can't read this because of the photocopy. It's rather like when you go to the optician and you can't see anything," he says.
The others gaze on placidly. This does not seem the sort of experience that would win you the South Carolina primary, or even a seat on Bedfordshire County Council. Yet watching two sessions on consecutive days, I begin to see the reader's point. The judge interrupts the lawyers constantly with questions and demands for clarification - and not just about page numbers. The lawyers find their lines of argument disrupted, their grasp of the facts tested.
At one point, the judge asks: "What am I supposed to be doing here?" This is less a philosophical inquiry than an expression of irritation at how long each of the seven banks and one building society is taking to present its case. Richard Snowden QC, representing HSBC, the next lawyer on his feet, finds himself streamlining his arguments.
It is easy to see how, after years of this, a lawyer might find hecklers and political opponents easy stuff. The problem for chief executives, I suspect, is not that they do not make enough speeches but that when they do, no one answers back.
The results were on display at the World Economic Forum at Davos last week. I was not there, but one of the wonders of the internet is that you can watch the webcasts. Indeed, if you are interested in improving your oratory, you can listen to the masters, from Winston Churchill to Martin Luther King, on YouTube.
There are few Churchills or Kings in today's executive suites. The Davos interview with John Chambers, chief executive of Cisco, began by asking: "What does the annual meeting theme, the power of collaborative innovation, mean to your business?" and did not get any more exciting than that.
Listening to the lawyer-turned- politician Tony Blair on the same panel as his new employer, James Dimon, head of JPMorgan Chase, was like watching the new Australian Open champion Novak Djokovic warming up with a ballboy.
Perhaps it does not matter. Chief executives are there to do, not speak - to make decisions, conclude deals, damp down crises. And if they do not make it in politics, so what? Well, it might help if more of them did: Michael Bloomberg has been an impressive mayor of New York. Also, if you are going to speak on so many platforms, you may as well do it properly.
In an interview in the McKinsey Quarterly last November, Chip Heath, professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford business school, gives business speakers two useful pieces of advice: keep it simple and keep it concrete. He worked with an organisation that had eight core values. The lawyer-turned-politician Bill Clinton had one: "It's the economy, stupid", which worked - at least at the time.
Second, avoid abstract proclamations, such as "we put our customers first". A practical anecdote is more effective, such as the one Prof Heath says they tell at FedEx.
A driver discovered he had forgotten the key to one of the boxes from which he had to pick up packages. If he went back for the key, the packages would miss their flights. So he ripped the entire box from its moorings. Better to destroy the box than the customers' trust.
There are plenty of stories like that in business - more, I suspect, than there are in Bundle E.
michael.skapinker@ft.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Accenture’s next champion of waffle words
By Lucy Kellaway
Published: January 27 2008 16:54 | Last updated: January 27 2008 16:54
When one door closes, another one opens. On Thursday the prison gates clanked shut behind Martin Lukes in Florida but, in London, the door of an office inside Accenture swung ajar, revealing Mark Foster, a middle-aged white man with a long-winded title.
Just as I was putting my final full stop to the story of the jargon-talking executive, someone forwarded me an internal e-mail sent by Accenture’s group chief executive for management consulting. Immediately I saw that this man could be a possible successor to Lukes. I don’t know if Mr Foster has Martin’s way with women or whether his golf swing is any good, as I have never met him. However, I have seen one of his e-mails and that is enough to convince me that, when it comes to world-class jargon, there is clear blue water between him and the rest – even at Accenture, where the bar, as they call it, is set so very high.
This isn’t the first time I’ve singled out Accenture for its work in the jargon space. A couple of years ago, I wrote a column about its annual report, which was a perfect snapshot of the ugliest business language of the time. Inside was an orgy of “relentless passion” and “delivering value”. The point, presumably, was to impress clients.
Yet Mr Foster’s e-mail is more troubling as it shows top people write like this even when they think no clients are looking. His memo was addressed to “All Accenture Senior Executives” – though title inflation being what it is, this probably stretches to include the cleaner. Indeed as “group chief executive”, Mr Foster is in a band of eight others with the same commanding title, and still has a couple of rungs to climb before reaching the very top.
The memo starts with some background to the announcement: “...wanting to give you continued visibility of our growth platform agenda...” it says. Visibility is the latest thing in business. Companies and executives all crave it but, until last week, I didn’t know that growth platform agendas were after it too. What is he saying here, I wonder? I think, though couldn’t swear to it, that he wants to tell his colleagues how the company plans to make more money.
And so to the meat of the memo. “We are changing the name of the Human Performance service line to Talent & Organization Performance, effective immediately.”
Before you marvel at the stupidity of the name change, note first that departments can’t even be called that: they are instead “service lines”. As for the name, the old one may have been no great shakes, but to take away the “human” (which was surely the point) and replace it with “talent and organisation” is not progress. As I’ve often remarked before, the word “talent” is a hideous misnomer as most people aren’t terribly talented at all.
Next comes the business rationale for the change. “With the rise of the multi-polar world, the task of finding and managing talent has become more complex, turbulent and contradictory than ever before.”
This conflicts with two laws, the first of geography – there are only two poles – and the second of business – finding “talent” has always been hard as there isn’t enough to go round. The only excuse for saying it is “complex, turbulent and contradictory” is to make it sound so complicated that the services of Accenture must be needed to sort it out.
Mr Foster says that what must be done is to teach organisations to “expand their talent management agenda from a narrow and tactical focus on human resources activities around the employee life cycle, to a broad and strategic focus on highly integrated systems of capabilities fundamental to business strategies and operations”. This is shameful, outrageous bilge. HR should be narrow. It should be specifically focused around the employee life cycle (if that means hiring, training, promoting, firing).
His suggestion is frightening. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen quite so many waffle words crammed together in one sentence. Broad. Strategic. Focus. Highly. Integrated. System. Capabilities. Fundamental. Strategies. Indeed the only words here that are acceptable are “to”, “and” and “on”.
I will spare you further long quotes from this dismal memo, which contains much “stepping up”, “blue water”, “space” and “walking the talk”. There is an obsession with capabilities. In four different places Mr Foster talks about “repositioning” them, “differentiating” them, “integrating” them and “evolving” them. This sounds like quite hard work, especially as I’m not quite sure what capabilities are anyway.
There is only one sentence I like – “Already we are seeing great progress!” – though it would be better still without the gung-ho exclamation mark.
Alas, the claim turns out to be unsubstantiated. The only progress mentioned is that the head of the newly named service line has written a book called The Talent Powered Organization and, to celebrate, Accenture is inviting clients to a party on Second Life – which I suppose cuts down on the bar bill.
How much does all this nonsense matter? Accenture isn’t selling pensions to widows; if its rich corporate clients are prepared to buy HR services designed for a multi-polar world, that is their lookout.
However, there is something else about the memo that worries me more. Accenture’s website reveals that, unlike Martin Lukes, Mr Foster has a classics degree from Oxford. I had always thought the point of studying classics was that it trained your mind and your pen. What this memo shows is that two decades at Accenture have a more potent effect on befuddling the mind than three years of Aeschylus and Horace ever had on sharpening it.
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