Someone I never heard of just invited me to a “leadership development programme” starting with the usual bow to management-bollocks.
“Engaged employees deliver constantly better performance in business”. What’s the matter with the married ones?
More to the point, why do people who have never led anyone anywhere, except maybe up the odd beckoning creek think themselves qualified to teach others how to go about it?
And by the way, we don’t need that many leaders. the ones we have seem to be fucking things up just fine.
H. L. Mencken strikes a chord with me: “The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.”
Here’s another, since I mentioned our current leaders.
“A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.”
Yet the interesting thing is that in the culture that this corporate creature exists in, he’s right. Everybody agrees with him.
There’s a problem though.
There’s a real world outside.
Just because a gaggle of corporate junkies all agree on one thing doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to agree on. You even see groups of expert marketers all agreeing on the wrong thing!
A wonderful example is the new craze for content marketing, which is defined by its own self-invented institute as stuff that informs but does not sell overtly. I guess this is better than most advertising, which neither informs nor sells. God save us from nitwits!