Pi-Consulting

The heads-up (cc-everyone) from the SVP HR EMEA put it so well. This is what it said:

“Pre the organizational transformation process, the absence of a sustainable enhancement model was occasioning situations including low involvement from collaborators, lack of agile systems for ongoing people development, an elevated incident index, and high rotation in our operations. Via a new organizational transformational model, we homologated ongoing enhancement systems related to productivity, in parallel with our corporate vision: Global-class process-centered flexible plants focused on business results with motivated multi-capable people for exceeding consumers’ expectations. Tracking of process advance was optimally leveraged via technical and human diagnosis.”

Great, eh? Terrific. Splendid. Yeah! Everyone clear?

Actually no, ninety-nine and counting percent of us are not clear at all. For those of you who (like the writer) need a translation of the above incomprehensible gibberish into real English, it actually means “Our workers were getting bored, sloppy and demotivated. After a few accidents, absenteeism rose and people started leaving. We fixed the problems, boosted morale, and the business got noticeably better.”

Okay, try this one: “An opportunity was identified to make [Company X] part of the authority-mandated solution for the increasing obesity issue in the country. By directly contributing to the introduction of new ethical norms, [Company X] has reaffirmed its commitment to the health of its consumers and to the development of responsible citizens and conscientious consumers”. Translation: “To avoid nasty legislation, we’re voluntarily telling people our food products contain quite a lot of sugar and they should eat less of them to avoid getting fat”.

As manufacturing companies never cease to tell us, in that particularly plummy tone they adopt when they feel pleased with themselves, “Here at PDQCorp” (or wherever ) “The Consumer Is King”. Try to find a trading company today that does NOT claim to be “customer-centric in everything we do”. But, dear corplings, eager beavers and apparatchiks, if you are really going to “put consumers at the center of your world”, you are going to have to learn to talk like them, rather than addressing the mirror in a language only you can understand.

I speak as someone who spends his life going through strategies, mission statements, “holistic global platforms”, “must-win battle plans” and the like from some of our planet’s largest corporations. It can get depressing, and remarkably samey. My sympathetic daughter recently gave me a rubber stamp bearing the legend “Complete And Utter Bullshit”, with a little red ink-pad to go with it. I have to confess that I apply it, in the privacy of my upstairs office, with depressing frequency on the upper right-hand corner of high-flown documents and briefs that cross my desk.

Call them CorpSpeak. Why express yourself clearly and simply, the thinking goes, when you can vastly impress your underlings (and probably yourself) with sonorous jargon-filled sentences like ”Our growth algorithm continues to be predicated on specific, tangible and aggressive initiatives for building on our CSD and NCB portfolio”. (Or, for simpletons like you and me, “We make money selling soft drinks”).

The curious thing is that so many companies think they have found a unique and infallible way of describing the world — or perhaps more accurately “their world”. Admittedly the acronyms seem to be different (but less so than you’d imagine) from company to company. But the twaddle and verbosity seem numbingly the same.

Not only is CorpSpeak a barrier against effective communication. It rapidly becomes a barrier against thought itself. By insisting that every aspect of our wonderfully and maddeningly complex human world can be encapsulated in an acronym or a jargon word, meaning itself soon becomes irretrievably lost. You hear the sentence. You think you understood it. But then you’re scratching your head, wondering if you really did. Trust me, in many cases there wasn’t much there to understand.

Pi, as a consumer insight company, is in the explaining business. We think the same should be true of everyone who makes a living by marketing products and services, (which, for heaven’s sake, is mostly common sense, not rocket-science). In today’s post, Pi wishes to strike a blow for clarity, comprehension and the KISS Principle: “Keep It Simple, Stupid!”.

We would go further. Any corporate utterance containing any of the words “excellence”, “paradigm”, “empowerment”, “innovative” (oh, really?) or “seamless” have a better-than-even chance of being complete-and-utter-b/s.

Homo Sapiens is defined by rationality. Since we mutated into Homo Consumiens, economists believe we are all supposed to be even more logic-driven in our pursuit of self-interest. Really? Maybe somewhere out there super-intelligent extra-terrestrials are monitoring our eBay bids and online purchases, checking the human race for signs of innate common sense. They should perhaps not hold their breath; (or chlorine gas, or whatever it is they breathe).

Faced with rational choices, the options we humans go for can be downright weird. At the supermarket checkout, a self-described thrifty, health-conscious shopper will pat herself on the back for choosing low-fat, no-added-sugar foods at bargain prices. Yet, just as her right hand is handing her money-off coupons to the checkout girl, her left hand is impulsively scooping up a high-priced gossip magazine and a handful of sugar-filled candy bribes for her fractious kids.

Such self-contradictions follow us as we try to “save money” online. We found the book we wanted, reduced. Just as we go to hit the checkout button, up comes a message saying “You qualify for this week’s special purchase. Spend another $19 and get free shipping”. We obediently agree to an additional item that we never intended to buy, to “save” $3.99. Hmmm. Define “free”.

These examples may seem trivial and random, but in fact they are neither, according to Dan Ariely, an MIT professor of behavioral economics, and author of “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions”. The all-too-human propensity for kidding ourselves betokens “irrational behaviors (that) are neither random nor senseless …but systematic”, says Ariely. “We make the same mistakes over and over”.

These ‘mistakes’ can be life-changing. Rationality says we should be minimizing debt, and saving for our retirement years. So why do we borrow to the hilt and spend virtually all the money we can lay our hands on? Last year, according to The New Yorker, Americans had $10.184 trillion in disposable income. They spent $10.132 of it. That’s 99.5%. Needless to say, a sizable proportion of the money went to credit card companies in late fees and interest payments.

As the report had it, “Americans, having reviewed their options, collectively resolved to spend virtually all the money they have”; proof that “people have trouble acting in their own self-interest”. Some theorize that this is because we are ‘loss-averse’, even when the ‘loss’ from our monthly pay-packet would be going into a savings fund. But how does that explain people who fail to enroll in company retirement plans even when no employee contribution is required?

Homo Sapiens means “Knowledgeable Man”. Yet we seem oddly incapable of perceiving the dividing lines between what we know and what we believe. Perhaps the best-measured example of this is the arresting fact that 60-70% of adult Americans believe the literal truth of Bible stories like the creation and Noah’s flood. Indeed, a 2007 Gallup survey reported 31% saying the Bible is “the actual words of God”. Yet when Gallup fielded questions about the Bible’s contents, half of respondents were unable to name its first book as Genesis; two-thirds did not know who gave the Sermon on the Mount – many thought it was Billy Graham – and 60% failed to name even half the Ten Commandments. 12% thought Noah was married to Joan of Arc. What we know and what we believe, it seems, can diverge.

Of course we have a new excuse for this. The internet has expanded the world’s supply of verbiage, and this fact allows us to dismiss things we don’t like the sound of as “too much information”. The cyber-avalanche of unsifted intelligence, inference and rant impedes real facts from reaching a wide audience. Last year the number of active blogs on the Net passed the 100 million mark. Their readers now vastly outnumber those who read serious, unbiased sources which have to filter their output through a team of fact-checkers. The result is that many of us now only read the ‘facts’ and opinions that actively appeal to us.

A case in point is the battle between Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia, (which the latter has resoundingly won, if eyeballs on screens is the measure; it claims 2.5 billion page-views per month). Britannica’s contributors have included Einstein, Freud, the economist Milton Friedman and more than 100 Nobel laureates. Wikipedia, by contrast, is a ‘wiki’, the type of website that allows visitors to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit content at their whim. Being voluntary, Wikipedia has no real editor. Its driving principle is “This is my truth; what’s yours?”. The aim is not necessarily truth per se, but the warm, fuzzy feeling of consensus. In consequence, Wikipedia offers more “knowledge” on Pokemon characters than on quantum mechanics.

Do we humans really want to know the truth at all? The way the majority of us vote in elections implies, for instance, that we believe saving jobs is more important than productivity and the prosperity it engenders. The folly of this was recently pointed out by a story in The Economist’s Lexington column. An economist inspects a dam-building project, and sees hundreds of workers with shovels. “Why not use a mechanical digger?” he asks, to be told that this would put people out of work. “Oh, fine, if it’s jobs you want, take away the shovels and give them spoons”. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Yet politicians figured out long ago that “job-protecting” xenophobia and protectionism mobilize more voters than genuine economic stimulus and fiscal common sense, however much better off those would make us. A candidate’s aim, after all, is to gain and keep power, not to fix things. We behave just as irrationally when choosing our leaders as we do when spending money.

All in all, it shows we humans are prone to endearingly muddled thinking. If asked by a clipboard-wielding canvasser to agree or disagree with the statement “Either something makes sense, or it doesn’t”, we seem disposed to reply “Uh… what was that middle one again?”

The average American adds a tip of between 8% and 37% after an enjoyable meal. Yet 40% of Americans profess to hate tipping as a practice. They are not alone. Australians have a long history of hating the whole idea of tipping, on the basis that “The person’s doing their job and getting paid, so why should I pay them even more?”. Sydney taxi drivers have been known to give tippers a nasty look, throw the tip money on the sidewalk, and shout “Think you’re better than me, eh, cobber?” (Source: Cornell University, Pi).

To dub? Or to sub-title? Movies on TV are supposed to be entertaining, and Spanish-speaking viewers don’t feel they should have to work too hard at having a good time. For mainstream American audiences, of course, the question scarcely arises, since foreign-language movies from beyond the US domestic market only hit the national consciousness with extreme rarity, if at all.

Views can vary in the dubbing vs. titles debate. In Latin America, for instance, large numbers of the films and TV shows aired are American in origin, but preferences for translation formats are far from uniform. Overall, dubbing seems to win by a comfortable margin. However, a surprising number of TV viewers and moviegoers in Argentina and Mexico say they prefer the original English soundtrack, and reading the sub-titles. This seems to correlate with (a) a higher proportion of the population professing to speak English, and (b) a sense of pride in taking Anglo-Saxon cultures on board undiluted. Upscale Mexicans, for instance, will be at pains to seem comfortable with Hollywood Americanisms in the original English. For their part, Argentineans notoriously regard themselves as more European than the Europeans. In Buenos Aires, the overwhelming practice in movie theatres is to show foreign films in their original version, with Spanish subtitles only provided for those ‘ignorant’ enough need them.

Curiously, in Brazil they tend to ‘dub-title’ movies, i.e. viewers get much English-language material dubbed into Spanish, with Portuguese subtitles added as well. This can get ferociously confusing. Your Pi blogmeister has sat on planes to Rio or São Paulo, and realized that the two simultaneous translations of the in-flight movie not only mis-represent the English original, but are also totally different from each other.

With dubbing, something always seems to get lost in the translation, and the quality of the movie-watching experience can suffer. Puerto Rican viewers, many of whom are bi-lingual in Spanish and English, complain that Hollywood fare dubbed into Spanish is often so badly done that the movies and series seem more like parodies of themselves. The same voice-over artists’ voices come back, thinly disguised, again and again. “It’s awful”, says one viewer in San Juan. “Serious programs come across as screamingly funny, while supposedly funny ones simply aren’t”. Sounds like “The Unwatchables”.

he average American will still order a double cheeseburger and large fries, then virtuously pick a diet soft drink to wash it down with. Since the early 1990s, America’s average bra size has jumped from 34B to 36C. Brassiere company executives attribute this mainly to the above mentioned double cheeseburgers and large fries, though surgical breast implants in the USA have also been increasing by as much as half each year. Clearly a contributory factor to the bra-size explosion. (Sources: Simmons, New York Times, American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, Pi).