Is it just me, or are the managers of the world getting smarter? I’m constantly dazzled by a glut of long and complicated sentences, often needing careful analysis. Intelligence seems to be the most important currency in the modern workplace, and our bosses want to give as much of it away as possible.
This trend towards higher intelligence has been happening for years. I once worked with a shy blonde lad called Tim, who had narrow shoulders and was unable to hold a gaze. He sidled into the office each morning, worked for eight hours, and then left. He was obviously stupid because unlike our managers, he didn’t give away his intelligence. When forced to speak, he used words like “use” instead of “leverage,” “range” instead of “bandwidth,” and “complete” instead of “holistic.” We wondered how anyone so simple-minded got the job in the first place. His one saving grace was that he was easy to understand, but we scoffed at this too, because we didn’t want to side with someone with his affliction. Big words meant big brains.
Our direct boss Jakob, on the other hand, was clearly a genius. He wore expensive silk shirts and impossibly shiny shoes, and drove a new Mercedes. He would ask questions such as “how are we leveraging our existing pipeline?” and “what’s the projected ballpark figure for our 2nd-quarter strategy?” He was a real big thinker—a man rubbing shoulders with the Gods. He was success personified. We aspired to dress like him, to talk like him, to act like him; to live in a home like his, to play with a dog like his, to sleep with a wife like his. When Jakob went to the pub on a Friday evening, we followed him like rats to a piper, even though we were committing to hours of confusion as he went into great detail about how he was going to drastically curtail the company’s long-term pain points, by proposing a unique paradigm shift to the CEO.
After a few months of working for the company, the pedestal on which we’ve placed Jakob began to crack. The first time we noticed it was when he brazenly declared that our market scope for the last 12 months had been unequivocally myopic, and that going forward, we were going to penetrate not one, but two major markets. Double penetration. Who did this guy think he was? Elon Musk? But he spoke with such confidence, and such an impressive vocabulary, that we continued to trust him. If he thought it possible to penetrate two countries at the same time, we’d be right beside him, tools in hand.
Inserting ourselves ruthlessly into a second market proved to be a lot harder than Jakob made out. The first phase of his master plan was aggressive circulation and assimilation in the market’s most efficacious associations. I thought this meant that we were going to bribe our way in, but Tim explained that we were just going to get chummy with industry experts. Despite being so stupid that he only used one and two syllable words, Tim had a knack for interpreting Jakob.
Once we’d aggressively assimilated, the second phase of the plan was disruptive innovation. I was certain that this meant we were going to come up with new ideas somewhere that would put people out, like the middle of the kitchen area, but Tim quietly explained that the disrupting part just meant that we were going to do things better than our competitors.
The third phase was pure brilliance. Once we’d aggressively assimilated ourselves in the market’s most vigorous social groups, then disrupted the industry with inconceivable innovation, we were going to achieve full penetration by synergising our departments to establish a single unitary contingent. As Jakob guided us through this part of his presentation, we all looked at each other in awe. Apart from Tim, who was quietly shaking his head. He asked what phase three meant. We sniggered at his idiocy, but listened intently. Jakob explained that it meant we were going to merge all departments into one—a solitary assemblage of collaborators—which would minimise the prevailing friction that had incapacitated the company until this immediate juncture in time.
Jakob was fired a couple of weeks after that meeting, so never achieved his master plan. He had a nervous breakdown and was diagnosed by psychiatrists as suffering from a “severe and incurable habit of verbal diarrhoea,” which Tim explained as “he couldn’t stop talking shit.” Despite Tim’s obvious stupidity, he somehow ended up taking his place as boss, and his ability to hold a gaze improved dramatically.
Though nobody admitted it, we were all much happier working for Tim.