Globalization?

Globalization is one thing—the striking down of economic barriers so that Jimmy Choo shoes and Vespas and hot new software and iPhones can be manufactured and sold anywhere. But when it comes to American business, only large corporations have the economic clout to effect such a thing, and it is a notion commonly held among people of imagination that involvement in corporate business will kill your soul.

You need only read the business section of any major U.S. daily to see why such a view persists. Acrimony seems to be the prevailing attitude, the more so as the companies and the ideas of their management teams get bigger and bigger. A mom-and-pop shop may have a human side. But you've really got to watch out for people like Ken Lay and Dick Cheney.

Corporate business is organized, aggressive war that is waged quietly.

As in modern warfare, there is also the euphemistic language. Who can forget everyone's favorite from the Vietnam era, "to interdict with extreme prejudice", which meant to murder someone? Corporate business, too, is filled with a kind of faceless jargon that, I believe, is intended to serve two purposes. It anoints the user as someone who understands the true bullying nature of corporate competition and can be depended upon to defend it; and it relieves the user of having to really feel, with subtlety and discrimination, the aggressive hostility that makes up so much of the business relationship ... hostility that surrounds him.

For example, one says that the good candidate for the senior position in Chicago has "the right skill set," as though one's skills can be pigeon-holed, arranged and instantaneously understood, for good or ill. The intangibles of a person's personality, like soulfulness, emotional openness, humor, the capacity for fellow-feeling and negotiation ... these things fall far outside the blockish bullet-points that make up a skill set. The very attributes that open up relationships and allow the free exchange of information —surely, own would think, the mother's milk of any successful business—gather themselves, muttering and scratching their heads, outside of the usual skill set. They wonder what Bob in Human Resources was possibly thinking about when he wrote the description for the sales manager job in Cleveland, and the leaden clichés that made up the skill set for that position. Perhaps because they are clichés, they show that Bob wasn't thinking of anything at all.

It may be that your having achieved "ten years of phenomenally successful sales growth for the leading provider of Internet-capable software initiatives" will look good in your skill set. But the fact is that, despite business's brusque dismissal of the emotions, you simply can't do business if you can't feel the emotional response of the person across the desk from you. That ability is never mentioned as part of any skill set for any position in corporate business.

Another favorite is the verb "to re-engineer". This came about, I believe, as a phrase intended to define the re-design of an existing product that works insufficiently or not at all. This sort of thing happens a lot in American business. The phrase also refers to processes in business that aren't working too well ... accounts receivable, supply chain and the like.

Article Author: Terence Clarke

Terence Clarke is a San Francisco novelist, journalist, and film maker who writes about the arts.

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