Producing produces production: onward.
Inescapable, the impression that language’s purpose is to obfuscate and not communicate, to confuse and not to reveal. Language makes things imperfect by entering them into time. In the daily realms of corporate practice, all communication is part of a mimetic game with infinite rounds, played unceasingly.
Robert Jackell is an anthropologist who studies law enforcement, agencies, and corporations. His masterpiece Moral Mazes purports to parse the ethics of the white-collar office. In brief: in workplaces competition is sublimated. Rage is pushed to the individual underground and there transmutes into calculated mimesis, trust bartering, and hypotheticals. Because success in business is dictated by the fickle tremors of the market’s invisible hand, one’s individual efforts are both critical and utterly irrelevant. In such a scene a superstitious constitution takes hold. In a vacuum of control, one strikes a style to influence.
Emails, coffee chats, meetings, sessions, town halls, debriefs, standups, skip-levels, 1:1’s, touchbases, all of these inane venues for “communication,” might be understood as the shifting highways whereon brisk traffic of bullshit, guff, and bluster crowd for lanes. Beneath the tedium, there is a flickering layer of signal, of alignment and affiliation. Turns of phrase from the CEO’s all-hands speech, lines from a business lead’s email, a concept invoked by a rainmaker. This communication, like the corporation itself, is a form of multiple bodies: it is a psychic trick that aims to read the mind, while, like sympathetic magic, drawing near to whatever fortune favors. Similar to the rules of forecasting under augury, which looks through the entrails or the flight paths to read the weather, one must read the room.
Rhetoric’s three appeals, if not overt, are at least wielded with intent and can be identified by the diligent student. By contrast, corporate rhetoric is a persistent thermohaline layer that conveys plausible deniability in the knowable cycles wherethrough it runs. I would submit a different three, indirect principles for the many-in-one corporate rhetoric:
Reflection. Return first what is served, with topspin. One must consider angles. Show one’s work, with intent. Inflection and arrangement hold rich valence of meaning. One does not “borrow” a phrase, one takes, and gives back the queasy high of spotting a stranger in a mirror and knowing it to be oneself.
Sublimation. Mark clearly the domain in which one will permit surprise. Let the shown feeling never be the same as the deeper feeling. Trace over the known patterns of feeling. Learn a judo of wills.
Momentum. Is everything, and is not up to any one, despite appearances. Is as important as timing. Is what serendipity requires to become luck. Is a property of capital that matter might acquire. Is what makes the line go up, or down.
A system with sufficient randomness will induce superstition. It only seems possible to decouple luck and envy when, not only does one rise, but someone else crashes and burns.
As an aside, much of the corporate rhetoric that drives yours truly absolutely wild originates in old school consulting and heavy manufacturing, and with the proliferation of the residency staffing model across American business in recent decades has sunk, fungal and festering, into nearly all professions. During the second week of my first job at [redacted] I listened, with mounting horror, as a manager conducting a call in the open office plan uttered the phrase “incentivize the deliverables,” certain I would never recover.