DrContrarian

Dear Mr CEO You said your job is to develop a vision and create an organisation with the right values that will make that vision a reality, so I thought I would drop this note in your lap for consideration. It is my contention that what goes for ‘strategy’ and ‘best practice’ in the modern corporate boardroom is a terminal degree of “me too-ism”. I think you have bought into a narrative that is promulgated by people who have a gnostic view of the world and specific agendas that appeal to the pseudo-thinkers of the world, but are in reality going to lead your organisation to its premature demise. OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY Over the years business organisations have been eaten away slowly from the inside by social justice warriors (SJWs). How this happened, requires us to go back a few years and in the evolution of the business organisation. Once you understand that, you will see how it has infested your organisation. Business organisations used to have a simple, clear obje...

USP = Unique selling Proposition. It should have died a long time ago, because it inflates the importance of what you are selling, instead of what you are buying. Long live the UBP. UBP = Unique Buying Proposition

What’s not… I read a piece today that made me think about the difference and the impact of what is and what is not. The author draws a parallel between a style guide and a menu. ‘A manual of style () and a menu share one important point in common: both impose limitations. The word "menu" is from the Latin - minuere, to diminish. You can tell as much about a restaurant by what isn't on the menu as by what is: a chef doesn't try to cook everything, or to appeal to everyone's tastes. A stylebook imposes its limitations on the varieties of a written language: it's from these many acts of limitation and diminishment that a style is formed.’ Marketers are guilty of always focusing on the point of difference, the proposition, the benefit, the key feature. We often ignore what the product/ service does NOT do or offer. Just like a menu tells you about what you can eat, what is not on the menu possibly says more about the restaurant and the chef than the ...

Cliches are usually/ often mocked and derided. (See list below.) My take on it is that cliches (in a business sense) is really just the art of business grappling with becoming a science, and cliches become the language of the emerging science. Cliches are not bad because they are popular sayings, they are only bad if they don't add to the clarity and understanding of a discussion. Cliches only risk being a distraction if the through overuse the familiarity means that people don't listen. I don't deny that some people go overboard - every wannabe consultant usually wants to coin and own a new buzzword that will become their point-of-difference, but that is price worth paying for progress. Where would we be without the cliches such as "point of difference" and many others? Click through to see the plexo

Core competency? Benchmark? Key issues? Sustainability? Ask any manager and they will explain what these words mean. To the uninitiated it is buzzwords. To the literati, it is a modern day plight that will destroy the English language. X wrote The Death of Language. Y wrote. Weaselwords. Hundreds and hundreds of pages devoted to slagging management-speak. Courses on Effective Business Writing will advise strongly against using technical jargon or made-up words. These courses, of course are always run by literary types, never business people an managers. (We are way too illiterate.) Funny that. And invariably they will also tell us that of the 800,000 ordinary (non-technical words) in the Oxford English Dictionary, the average person only uses about 8,000: that is one percent of the available words. The implication of course, ‘we’ know many more. It is then followed by a joke that you should not use ‘pulchritude’ when the word ‘beautiful’ would do. Ha ha. Their strateg...