Marketing-Thema.com

‘Our organizations are flooded with empty talk. We are constantly « going forward » to lands of « deliverables, » stopping off on the « journey » to « drill down » into « best practice. » Being an expert at using management speak has become more important in corporate life than delivering long lasting results. The upshot is that meaningless corporate jargon is killing our organizations. In this book, management scholar Andre Spicer argues we need to call this empty talk what it is: bullshit. The book looks at how organizations have become vast machines for manufacturing, distributing and consuming bullshit. It follows how the meaningless language of management has spread through schools, NGOs, politics and the media. Business Bullshit shows you how to spot business bullshit, considers why it is so popular, and outlines the impact it has on organizations and the people who work there. It also outlines what we can do to minimise bullshit at work. The author makes a case for why organizations need to avoid empty talk and reconnect with core activities. This provocative, lucid book is essential reading for professionals, researchers and managers.’

This great book reminds me Franck Lepage critical work about the manufacturing of positive words to hide the corporate agenda. A brilliant mind who is quite critical about how the business world perverts the vocabulary and creates an Orwellian positive terminology and impeaches us from focusing on the essential. Other french authors addressed this approach like Eric Hazan with his ground breaking book LQR, we have also the great book the empire of good (l’empire du bien) written by Phlippe Muray, and also the extensive work of the french sociologist Luc Boltanski about how the word hierarchy disappeared from the management books in the last 20 years and was replaced by consensual words like cooperation, participation, projects, etc… So do we live in a world where hierarchy doesn’t exist anymore? No! but it’s not in the Zeitgeist to make people think about it. The perception is more important than reality and everything starts with the building blocks of our ideas (i.e: our words)! You can find here a list of all these great books: 

Spicer, A. (2017). Business bullshit. Routledge.

Hazan, É. (2006). LQR: la propagande du quotidien. Raisons d’agir.

Muray, P. (1991). L’empire du bien. Belles lettres.

Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, E. (2005). The new spirit of capitalism. International journal of politics, culture, and society, 18(3-4), 161-188.

YB

Une facon amusante et positive de critiquer le système consumériste actuel et ses derives. L’eglise de la tres sainte consommation … a consommer sans moderation !

Creating the best possible logo? An avatar based on the preferences of your consumers? The best combination of features for you product? The content with the best likelihood to become viral? The best description for your products that will maximize the conversion rates? And all of that automated? YES, it’s possible!

Generative modeling can identify the distribution of data and generate something similar or with the same proprieties, for example an image, a text, a sequence for music, etc… applications are infinite … this technology allows companies to mimic and automate CREATIVITY! This is why it’s a big revolution!

YB

Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL), of which Paris-Dauphine is a founding member, is ranked as the best French university, and the only one of the top 50 of the Times Higher Education (THE), a world ranking of universities, published by The Times.

Muray, P. (1991). L’empire du bien. Belles lettres.

Une ode à l’esprit critique, contre l’empire des mots confisqués, du tout va bien, et contre l’uniformisation de la pensée et des masses, les travaux de Muray me rappellent un autre homme qui à fait le même constat à la fin de sa vie. Le Grand Levi-Strauss ! Nous vivons dans un monde qui n’accepte plus qu’on pense hors de son cadre et ils nous ont prévenu il y’a plus de 30 ans !