Or how the metaverse will save us, one contorted axiom at a time.

Ambrose Bierce, of sainted memory, is known for a Devil’s Dictionary, a cynic’s primer on human behavior, laid out in Noah Webster style.

Pity he strayed into hostile territory in bandit-infested Northern Mexico in 1913, never to be seen again. Maybe someone lurking in the sagebrush took offense at imagined slights in the Dictionary. People are so thin-skinned.

Pity also that he lived one hundred years too soon. Bierce missed his moment. Obfuscation has exploded, rivaling worthless college degrees (or maybe because of them). A euphemistic pandemic with no known vaccine, for which we need a new dictionary, has infiltrated our lexicon. Straight talk in professional settings is frowned upon, covertly if not overtly. Blunt talk is often memorable and career-threatening. Verbal mush is benign and soon forgotten. As the author of the Bartleby column in the Nov. 20, 2021, edition of The Economist noted, concerning contemporary biz-speak, “People rarely say what they mean, but hope that their meaning is nonetheless clear. Think Britain, but with paycheques. To navigate this kind of workplace, you need a phrasebook.”

Reading minds is outside our capability.

Running a business is hard. There are many moving parts to contend with, both from the customer’s side and that of the enterprise itself. A knife’s edge of difference enables those parts to work symphonically rather than as a cacophony. The cacophony often prevails. Not for nothing is the practice of good management often characterized as more art than science, especially when “good” is a matter of perspective and bias.

We’re dealing with humans. Most simply want to make a living and provide for those closest to them. For that reason, when studying economics in college long ago, I always found incongruous the assertions of those theorists who tried to reduce human behavior and all its attendant unorthodoxies and irrationality to a series of simultaneous equations. Despite the mathematical elegance, something didn’t fit into such a neat solution. People aren’t abstractions, but I was too young and inexperienced to adequately express my misgivings about the incongruity. Plus, I wanted an A.

Time has added depth, and depth comes from time-tested experience. Experience, and hitting many walls, reveals a range of motivations.

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If time is money, getting to The Point is invaluable.  

Add “space" to the growing list of vandalized spoken English words.

As in, “We work in the AI space.”

Reminds one of workers beavering away in a corrugated shipping container with the letters “AI” stamped on the outside.
Or, “My career trajectory has symbiotic granularity with the ERP or IT or CRM space.”

What?

Are people who speak like this born this way or did they acquire this skill in school? For what purpose? Contrary evidence above notwithstanding, one must nevertheless cultivate the space between the ears.

Famously there is NASA, which spends its days laboring in the Space space. Or used to. Now commercial interests dare to boldly go where no one went before, spatially. NASA just writes the rules. Billionaires get the accolades.

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Is round-the-clock engineering any way to live?

IDLENESS, n. A model farm where the devil experiments with seeds of new sins and promotes the growth of staple vices.
– Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

What makes a marketing expert a Marketing Expert?

What distinguishes a soft skill from a hard skill?

Is expertise conferred with an MBA at the tender age of 27? (How can somebody be considered a master of anything at 27?) Does wisdom come from meeting one’s quota nine reporting periods out of 10? Is it filling up spaces with arcane verbiage, hoping the reader is overwhelmed and won’t ask impertinent questions, like what does this all mean, and how does it benefit me?

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