Uncovering the BS

Calling out the BS - Guest blog by John Higgins

What does this image say to you?

 In his cracking new book, Radical OD, Mark Cole says he is ‘personally moved to observe that the harsh overseer is more honest about their intent than the duplicitous humanistic manager’.

 In a world addicted to growth, forever wanting to squeeze more from less, the denial of this brute contract creates an Alice in Wonderland world where nothing is as it seems – and everyone pretends, prisoners of an undiscussable ideology.

 To be nice to people has to have a business case. To be ethical, upstanding, a decent colleague, friend or lover has to have a business case. Everything gets sucked into a morass of instrumentalism, where we all become tools to each other – and people wonder why loyalty, collegiality and mutuality have evaporated.

 To overcome this, but without challenging the basic extractive nature of workplace relations, the consulting and business school world ramp up the wall of bullshit, featuring any number of nonsense words that apply fake perfumes to this stinking reality.

 Meanwhile those who benefit most from this extraction of performance from people, hold fast to the fantasy that everything is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds. And so the collapse in trust across the hierarchies of life grows – hierarchies which those at the top desperately try to deny are there. Silence and play acting become the norm.

 In the old Soviet bloc the saying went: ‘We pretend to work and you pretend to pay us’. This can now be reworked to apply to modern Western work life: ‘We pretend to buy-in and you pretend to care’.

Contact John at https://www.speakinguplisteningup.com/