Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
Now accepting keynotes for 23Q3-24Q1
Every year, I create three main presentations. For 2023, they are:
Delusions of determinism: Why planning for success leads to failure
Regression toward the meme: Why modern leadership continues to fall into old traps
Under pressure: Retail in a new financial era
If you want to book me for your event, workshop, or guest speaking slot, just send me an email. To make sure I am available, however, please do so at your earliest convenience; my schedule is filling up fast. More information can be found here.
A couple of updates before we go-go
When I began writing this yesterday morning, I had just received an email saying that my new router was available for pickup. Indeed, it turned out that the issue was hardware related; my Asus machine had, less than a year old, decided to retire. And so, with a naïveté that quite frankly is beneath me, I thought my IT problems would finally be sorted. Yeah, right. Everything seemed fine until I updated the firmware. In an instant, the 5G network disappeared like an alcoholic stepdad on Christmas, and my connection speed dropped to levels that would have been considered unacceptable decades ago.
It is now 9.19pm. At 9.17pm, I had tried pretty much everything. Nothing. And then, without me doing anything except cursing under my breath, the router suddenly decided to work. The only conclusion I can reach is that I have transcended the human plane and become an entity able to communicate with software through profanity. I should probably update my CV.
Anyway. My daughter will be back in kindergarten next week. This means, at long last, that I can get back to proper writing sessions and, for the purposes of this newsletter, start building this fall’s content schedule. The main events will begin in September, as many of you will be away for holiday the next few weeks. But rest assured, they are coming.
In the meantime, the recording of my talk at Techsylvania is now available to the public. If you want to have a look, you can find it here.
Item of the week
As many of you will be aware, most currently used LLMs (a.k.a. AIs) pull information from the internet and synthesize it into texts that are used by the lazy in lieu of proper journalistic or analytical effort. However, in so doing, they habitually fail to separate truth from fiction. This, of course, opens up immense opportunities for trolling.
And so, gaming communities (e.g., World of Warcraft, Destiny 2) have been filling online forums with nonsense about a made-up new boss called Glorbo in their respective games. Sure enough, articles on “strategies for beating Glorbo” followed.
Although funny in isolation, it demonstrates a massive problem that far too few have considered: with a sufficiently synchronized desinformation campaign, LLMs can quite easily be tricked into believing utter nonsense. If the texts that they generate are then published without scrutiny (which continues to happen), media manipulation will be an ever greater problem going forward. There is more to this than Skynet.
Now onto today’s topic.
Plain language is often best
But technical language serves a purpose
Last week, I went on an unwanted rant about the meaning of the word effectiveness (or, perhaps more accurately, the lack thereof). In summary, my point was that the most common definitions range from bad to worse – and that, as a result, effectiveness frequently gets conflated with efficiency. Sure enough, mere days later, a supposed authority within the field argued that digital ads were effective because they provided a high ROI.
Oy vey. It is, as the late Christopher Hitchens once said, enough to make a cat laugh.
If we are to make a distinction between the two terms, at this point, we might as well call effectiveness what makes a bang, and efficiency what makes a bang for the buck. But in an actual corporate setting where finance is involved, anything that makes a bang will require a buck. The question will always be what the size of each is in relation to the other.
That is not to say that every return has to be viewed through the immensely narrow lens that is traditionally defined ROI (a topic that I will cover at length at a later date). A return might be better price elasticity, superior pricing power, an increase in free cash flow, or whatever else. But a return there must be; “brand-building” is no longer, if it ever were, an acceptable excuse for marketers whenever a financial impact is missing in action.
This, in turn, requires jargon – technical, particular language.
It is perhaps a controversial point, but nonetheless true. Technical language provides a shortcut for those in the know; it gets straight to the point. The problem, as we all know, is that it is more commonly used to do the opposite. Consultants in particular love to create the appearance of being in the know by using jargon where inappropriate. “Consultancy speak”, somewhat ironically, has now become jargon for jargon in a negative sense.
But it is not the fault of jargon itself; linguistic precision matters. If I am to analyze a strategic undertaking, for example, I need to know that the relevant performance indicators are consistently defined and utilized throughout the firm – and, where applicable, in relation to the market. It is here that the effectiveness discourse falls flat. Most every company works to their own definitions, which is fine for those working in them (in fact, I would argue such proprietary definitions are precisely what they should seek to establish) but entirely useless for anyone looking to compare results between companies.
There is, to illustrate via means of financial metrics, a reason why no serious analyst takes adjusted EBITDA seriously; there is simply too much room for arbitrariness. WeWork provides perhaps the most egregious example. When the headlines about its losses were finally beginning to match the losses themselves in size, the company tried to claim that their “community adjusted EBITDA” proved that the company was profitable. In order to calculate the number, they subtracted not only interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, but also basic expenses like marketing, general and administrative, and development and design costs. It was as well received as you probably think.
It was only the allowed vagueness of the term “adjusted EBITDA” that enabled WeWork to do it, and the same issue exists in the effectiveness discourse. If effectiveness is defined as “how well one achieves a desired result”, one could, as silly as it would be, reason that WeWork was effective. They desired to be profitable, and removing anything even remotely resembling a cost helped them achieve it.
It was utter nonsense, of course, as is the above argument on any other grounds than logic. But pour an Effie Award judge a few drinks and they will tell you similar stories from their latest round of entries. I know, because I have.
Admittedly, strategic management, where I do my own work, is not much better. Ask aloud what “strategy” means and all sorts of people from all sorts of professions will confidently give you their interpretation as if it were established truth. But you will find little consistency among the definitions provided.
As we have discussed before, most commonly, a strategy is considered a) a plan, a "how," a means of getting from here to there, b) a pattern in actions over time, c) a position that reflects decisions to offer particular products or services in particular markets, or d) a perspective, i.e. a vision and direction. But not only are these uses different, they are so different as to practically be each other’s counterparts. A plan is the result of direct control and deliberateness, whereas a revealed pattern is the outcome of indirect control and emergence. A position is where one is, while a direction is indicative of where one wants to be (and therefore per definition cannot be). So when someone says that the strategy of one company is better than that of another, what exactly do they mean?
The answer, more often than not, is whatever we, the audience, believe it to be. We imbue their words with our meanings and then assume everyone else shares it. They do not. They do the same.
It is for this reason that some argue that any new approach, framework, or management system needs its own vocabulary. Dave Snowden, for one, frequently points out that it is only by changing language that we might change how people think. Perhaps he is right. He typically is.
If nothing else, though, it is clear beyond any evidentiary thresholds that the current modus operandi of ensuring enough slack that everyone gets their own version of reality is doing little more than holding us back. We see it in marketing advertising effectiveness, strategic management, and anywhere else where the lax attitude towards language enables superficial solutions – because the problem with doing something for cosmetic reasons is that one always ends up with cosmetic results.
Until next week, have the loveliest of weekends.
Onwards and upwards,
JP
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