The Weasel Words of Modern Productivity Theatre

Beware the words and phrases that try to disguise the non-effectiveness of an individual or team. For example, they use ‘urgent’ but you know ‘they forgot to anticipate this’; senior leadership announce that ‘there will be a re-org’, you know that means ‘they still can’t get the organisation to work together’; the head of sales announces ‘in the spirit of openness and inclusivity’, you think ‘there are twenty people too many in the project meeting’; the presenter says ‘I recognise the slide deck is a bit long’, you know that ‘they cut and paste this twenty minutes before the meeting’.

Watch out for: o ‘Quick win’ = ‘we need something, anything, desperately soon to show that we are working’. o ‘Burning platform’ = ‘We ignored this for years; now panic.’ o ‘Fast-track’ = ‘Skip thinking, hope for the best.’ o ‘Let’s take this offline’ = ‘This is awkward and I don’t want observers.’ o ‘North Star’ = ‘An extremely vague aspiration.’ o ‘Transformational’ = ‘Expensive and disruptive; outcome unclear.’ o ‘Future-proof’ = ‘Sounds reassuring but it is clearly not.’ o ‘Roadmap’ = ‘A slide with arrows.’ o ‘Thought leadership’ = ‘A LinkedIn post.’ o ‘Lean in’ = ‘Please do more work without more pay.’ o ‘Empowered teams’ = ‘You are responsible; we retain control.’ o ‘High-performing culture’ = ‘Long hours have been normalised.’ o ‘Radical transparency’ = ‘Selective disclosure.’ o ‘In the spirit of agility’ = ‘No clear plan.’ o ‘Data-driven’ = ‘ChatGPT gave us a number that supports our view.’ o ‘Rightsize’ = ‘Cut people.’

Barnes and Noble soon.

Meanwhile it’s available here.

Read it. I loved it.

The world no longer holds still long enough to be studied.

Companies are no longer static objects you analyse once and understand for a decade.

Consider banking in the UK. For a century, from 1870 to 1970, your local branch ran almost identically: the same teller windows, the same ledgers hardening into filing cabinets. Your grandfather’s banking experience in 1920 was, in every way that counted, the same as yours in 1970. Then came the ATM. Then, telephone banking with the revolutionary First Direct. Then online. Now? Revolut adds crypto trading, Monzo ships budgeting AI, and the high-street banks push out updates every quarter just to stay alive. What was identical for a hundred years now changes every hundred days.

By the time you’ve understood the company, it’s a different company. The skill can’t be ‘learn the fixed answer,’ because there is no fixed answer. The skill has to be continuous judgment.

Speed matters, but speed without judgment is just fast failure.

The old advantages were durable. Ford dominated by building the best assembly line, an edge that rivals took decades to close. Kodak ruled for eighty years on superior film chemistry. Now, a good feature is copied in weeks, so the question is no longer ‘who has the best feature?’ but ‘who moves well, fastest?.’ It wasn’t the finest video platform ever built; it was the one ready to scale the moment the world needed it.

But we must be careful because this is where the cult of speed gets people killed.

Quibi raised $ 1.75 billion, launched in April 2020 with every advantage money can buy, and was dead by December. Fast, bold, and pointed in the wrong direction. Peloton genuinely was the boldest reimagining of home fitness in a generation and then mistook a pandemic spike for a permanent trend and built its cost base for a world that evaporated.

Speed without judgment doesn’t get you there sooner. It gets you to a problem quicker.

The real differentiator is not JUST speed or boldness. It is speed plus judgment: moving fast in a direction you have had the wisdom to choose. No framework chooses the direction for you. That is the call you have to make: that’s you. That’s me. That’s the value we add.

The Clickety-Clack and the Heat

Early rails were short and brittle. In the 1790s, cast iron versions, about four feet long, were being bolted down. By 1820, wrought iron had stretched them to fifteen feet. The first steel rails arrived in 1857, and over the following decades, the standard length crept up from thirty feet to sixty. Sixty feet, eighteen metres, became the length some of us grew up hearing.

Hearing is the right word. Those rails were laid end to end, with a small gap between each, held together by fishplates. The gap was deliberate. Steel grows when it warms, and a rail with nowhere to go will fight back, so the engineers left it room. Every time a wheel crossed one of those gaps, it gave a knock, and with two rails and a regular wheelbase, the knocks fell into a rhythm. Clickety-clack. It was the sound of a problem being managed, though it became the sound of the railway itself, the thing people remember from sleeper trains and childhood holidays.

The problem is simple physics. Steel expands by roughly 12 parts per million for every degree Celsius. That sounds trivial. Run the numbers along a real railway, and it stops being trivial. Take a five-kilometre length of rail. Warm it by a single degree, and it grows by about six centimetres. Warm it by ten degrees, an ordinary swing on an English afternoon, and it grows by sixty centimetres. Two feet. A rail with nowhere to expand does not lose that energy. It pushes to the side instead, and the track snakes out of line. Railwaymen call it a sun kink, or a buckle. On the worst days, a train has to be stopped before it reaches one. Imagine in today’s heat of 37C!

The gaps solved the buckling, but they also wore everything out. The joint was the weak point, hammered by every passing wheel, and it brought the rough ride and the maintenance bill along with it.

The answer was to get rid of the joints, which sounds like asking for the buckling back. But the trick is in the laying. The first long welded rail in Britain, almost a mile of it, went down on the East Coast Main Line just south of Carlton-on-Trent in 1957. From 1960, the practice spread, and by about 1968, continuous welded rail was the standard being rolled out across the network. Instead of leaving room to expand, the engineers clip the rail hard to heavy concrete sleepers and pre-stretch it as they lay it, setting it stress-free at around 27 degrees. On a hot day, the steel cannot move, so the warmth becomes pressure held in place rather than movement let loose. On a cold day, the same trick stops it from pulling apart.

So the modern track is smoother, quieter, and lasts far longer. The clickety-clack has mostly gone, traded for a hush. Honestly, that’s a bit of a shame!

The world no longer holds still long enough to be studied.

Companies are no longer static objects you analyse once and understand for a decade.

Consider banking in the UK. For a century, from 1870 to 1970, your local branch ran almost identically: the same teller windows, the same ledgers hardening into filing cabinets. Your grandfather’s banking experience in 1920 was, in every way that counted, the same as yours in 1970. Then came the ATM. Then, telephone banking with the revolutionary First Direct. Then online. Now? Revolut adds crypto trading, Monzo ships budgeting AI, and the high-street banks push out updates every quarter just to stay alive. What was identical for a hundred years now changes every hundred days.

By the time you’ve understood the company, it’s a different company. The skill can’t be ‘learn the fixed answer,’ because there is no fixed answer. The skill has to be continuous perceptive judgment. Now that really is a skill.

How I Use AI, 2 of Many

While I am writing one of my Companion Series, it has a working title (eg Boost your Productivity). As I write this can change as I realise I can create a better focus or suggestion for the potential future reader/purchaser.

When I am very close to publication and finalising the cover, I ask Claude what it thinks of the title; often it has a very good suggestion especially for the sub-title.

We are never just ourselves.

We are ourselves plus the world we move through. A human being is not a sealed unit but a creature in constant exchange with its surroundings: light and dark, warmth and cold, soil underfoot, water, the company of others. Take the natural half of that exchange away and something in us quietly begins to fade.

We are us, plus environment. Remove the environment and we lose part of what keeps us well.

The evidence is all around us, and most of it we already feel in the body before we can name it.

The pandemic, when it shut us indoors for weeks on end, taught a whole generation a lesson their ancestors never needed to be told: that we are not built for ceilings and screens, and that twenty minutes under an open sky can do more for the spirit than an afternoon of rest on the sofa. Watch a small child near a puddle and you see the original setting restored: the delight in mud, in splashing, in rain on the skin, all of it there long before we teach them to stay clean and stay in. A single day in wild country, by the sea or under trees, can loosen something that a fortnight of comfort only tightened. Even the hospital ward bears it out: patients given a window onto trees, one well-known study found, healed faster and asked for less pain relief than those left facing a brick wall.

And we all know the homelier version of the same truth, the flat, grey mood that lifts only once we have moved, sweated, and used the body for the thing it was made to do.