thedanglingmodifier.co.uk

Somebody left a comment on my blog about “people talking shit”. Of course, people do talk shit, but the real problem is that people believe the shit. They even pay vast sums of money for the privilege of wading through pages of the stuff.

No one profits more from people believing shit than management consultants. They’re so good at talking and believing in their own brown stuff, they can easily convince other people to wallow in it too. Tony Blair practically bathed in it, spent millions of taxpayers money on it – although not as many millions as his successor has spent on the banks.

There’s this idea isn’t there, that the private sector can show the dusty old public sector a thing or two about efficiency. So in come the management consultants with their ‘improvement levers’.

Yes, I said ‘improvement levers’ – what the ‘Sun’ newspaper once defined as:

“using tools to get the job done”.

But, if you want to know what ‘improvement levers’ really are, take a look at Ernst & Young’s ‘Five Lever Advantage’.

Ernst & Young tell us that the first of five ‘improvement levers’ is ’strategic direction’. This includes assessing:

“the feasibility of leveraging on existing opportunities and performance…”

In other words working out how to make the most of existing opportunities and build on what your business is doing well. Surely if you can’t work that out, you shouldn’t be running a business?

The next ‘improvement lever’ is ‘performance management’. Ernst & Young can help you, the client:

“in the translation of corporate strategies into tangible objectives, supported by a set of balanced measures that align across the organisation”.

What sort of corporate strategy doesn’t already have objectives? Are we to assume from this that big business is being run by a bunch of clueless idiots who don’t know where to start?

And how is an objective ever ‘tangible’? If it’s ‘tangible’, that means you can touch it. They mean ‘achievable’ but I bet whoever wrote this thought ‘tangible’ sounded cleverer because it’s more obscure.

Then we have an expression that you find all too often in business and government writing: ‘align across the organisation’. What they mean is that they will introduce the ‘balanced measures’ in every part of the organisation.

And what are the measures balanced by anyway? Each other? Or do they mean that the measures are in touch with their inner selves? That they won’t just fly off the handle or lose it at some point when the office is busy.

Next we come to “People Organisation & Change”, where the first so-called sentence in this paragraph is not a grammatical sentence. So among the elements that their “comprehensive solutions encompass” don’t expect to find basic English.

Oh dear and the paragraph about ‘Process’ starts with a non-sentence too. You’d think that wealthy corporates like Ernst & Young could afford twenty quid an hour to employ a proof-reader, but presumably this is one of the “transformation interventions for significant process improvements” that they can’t “analyse, design, deliver and implement”.

Either that or they really don’t expect anyone to bother reading this far down the page. I wouldn’t have read it all myself if I didn’t want to pull it apart. And even I’m bored by the last paragraph on technology – more leveraging and non-sentences – although I can’t help but wonder what a “technology imperative” is.