Letters From Rick Deckard

I recently received an invitation to enroll in a Business School class. The following introduction is taken directly from the e-mail which I hope was sent to a mass list of students and my name was just form-fed into the bullshit-o-tron 9000.

From: REDACTED@bus.wisc.edu
Subject: SUSTAINABILITY and QUALITY Courses for SPRING 2012

Hello David,

Professor REDACTED would like to invite you to the course he is teaching this Spring on sustainable approaches to strategic breakthrough. This course takes a leadership perspective for sustained organizational success, and focuses on the deployment of breakthrough strategy that supports both the organization’s mission and its journey to sustainability. The strategic intent is to satisfy multiple objectives of a diverse set of organizational stakeholders while preparing the organization for a sustainable future. Students will have the opportunity to select a study topic or organizational issue of their own choosing and apply the relevant course material to that topic. Topics may involve organizational projects, applications to industry sectors, governments or NGOs, strategic organizational challenges, theses, dissertations, product and service strategy, or any issue involving strategic breakthrough that is important to the student.

I'd normally say that this is a laughable attempt to pass the Turing Test, but then it dawned on me that only a human mind could possibly create this much bullshit in the course of three sentences. And following in the footsteps of Aristotle, I'd like to quantify, classify, and organize this bullshit.

Bullshit Level 0
SUSTAINABILITY and QUALITY Courses for SPRING 2012

When you CAPITALIZE the words you want people to READ, it gets under THEIR SKIN because they feel MANIPULATED and it's like YOU ARE SHOUTING.

Bullshit Level 1
This professor would not like to invite me to the course. This professor, by virtue of this very e-mail, has extended me such an invitation. The passive voice is to be avoided, remember? But to form-fill in my name and then start the soft-sell like this is supposed to make me feel less threatened. He is a professor and he would like to do something for me!

Bullshit Level 2
"sustainable approaches to strategic breakthrough"

There's no words there! What does that mean? That doesn't mean anything!

Let's have a little talk about sustainability. Sustainability is a very important and laudable goal for any business or society to have. It means that you can 'sustain' the way you do things for a long time (hopefully indefinitely). So a lot of agriculture right now is unsustainable because it uses more groundwater than is being recharged into the aquifer. Agriculture uses a lot of fossil fuels which is not a sustainable practice- we are using up more coal, oil, and natural gas than our planet is generating. So a push for 'sustainable' agriculture would mean growing crops that use less water, take up less space, increase the amount of yield you get per amount of energy you expend, etc.

So you can think of all sorts of ways to make different businesses sustainable. You could develop better technology that does a manufacturing process in a way that uses less energy. You can change the packaging on a product so it is more biodegradable.

And now, a bit about strategy. Strategy (in contrast to 'tactics') is knowing what to do to win a game. Tactics are the specific actions you take to execute your strategy. If the game is Settlers of Catan, it may be a winning strategy to buy development cards and build up the Largest Army and have a few victory points. A good tactic you could use to accomplish that strategy is to place your first settlements near the required resources. A bad tactic you could use to accomplish that strategy is to convert four of one resource into the resource that you need.

Strategies exist in the business world too, of course. Some companies have expensive advertising campaigns to improve your image of their brand. Pepsi and Coke don't really try to convince you that their product tastes better, they try to convince you that their product is cooler, trendier, that all of your friends drink it, that you become irresistibly attractive when you drink it. Other companies just blatantly say they are superior (this truck has won awards; watch it go up this corkscrew tower of flaming death in the desert). That's more a change of tactics than a change of strategy.

Some companies sell a product at a discounted rate so they can sell you a different one later and jack the price up. Keurig coffee makers work like this: you buy the machine for less than it costs the company to make it, then you pay through the nose for the special Keurig-style coffee canisters to use it. Same thing with Gillette razors: you pay $2 for your handle for your Mach III and $15 for a refill cartridge.

So 'sustainable approaches to strategic breakthrough' should mean that there are reliable, indefinitely repeatable ways to develop business plans that are better than all of the plans we've ever had before. But it doesn't.

Bullshit Level 3
"This course takes a leadership perspective for sustained organizational success"

A perspective is a way of viewing a certain subject.



From one angle, this is a picture of a lion. But by changing your perspective and flipping the picture upside down, you see a mouse instead. So what does it mean to take a leadership perspective? Nothing, really. They just wanted to work the word 'leadership' in there somehow. But this is a business school, the point of which is to make good middle management people. This class will be looking at a few topics from the perspective of future middle managers, future leaders. It will not look at the scientific repercussions of these sustainable practices or the political policies needed to enact them. It will not look at the engineering principles needed to analyze a sustainable system. It will adopt a leadership perspective.

"Sustained organizational success" is also just word padding. They wanted to say 'sustainability' again but must have feared that saying it outright would tip off the spam filter. Isn't all success in business supposed to be sustained? Do we consider CEO's successful if their organization doesn't make money?

Bullshit Level 4
"[This course] focuses on the deployment of breakthrough strategy that supports both the organization’s mission and its journey to sustainability."

"[This course] focuses on the strategy of deploying breakthroughs that support both the organization’s mission and its journey to sustainability."

"[This course] focuses on the strategy of supporting breakthroughs that deploy both the organization’s mission and its journey to sustainability."

"[This course] focuses on supporting and deploying breakthroughs that sustain both the organization’s strategy and its mission."

"[This course] focuses on supporting and deploying strategic breakthroughs that sustain the organization’s mission."

"[This course] focuses on the journey of deploying strategic breakthroughs that support both the organization’s mission and its sustainability."

"[This course] focuses on missing breakthroughs that support both the organization’s strategy and its journey to sustainability."

One of the above sentences was actually from the e-mail. Can you guess which? I've written the answer upside-down on the next page so you can't cheat.

Bullshit Level 5

"The strategic intent is to satisfy multiple objectives of a diverse set of organizational stakeholders while preparing the organization for a sustainable future."

Remember from the previous 'sentence' that the course focuses on deploying strategy (or what I'd call, 'tactics'). What is the nature of this strategy? It is to:

1. Support the organization's mission. If you are a shoe store, your mission is to sell shoes. So a good strategy for a shoe store will include selling shoes.

2. Support the organization's journey to sustainability. If you are a shoe store, people might not wear shoes forever, so have a backup plan.

3. Satisfy multiple objectives of a diverse set of organizational stakeholders. If you are a shoe store, your customers might want shoes that light up when you walk, allow you to fly like Hermes, and cost a nickel. The government of the USA might want you to pay taxes, but it also might want you to not treat Malaysian kids like slaves. The people who own stock in your company might want good dividends and for you to cut costs by treating Malaysian kids like slaves. Try to develop a strategy that does all or some of this.

4. Prepare the organization for a sustainable future. If you are a shoe store, people might not wear shoes forever, so have a backup plan. This is pretty much the same as point 2. That is, they are saying the same thing only using different words.

Bullshit Summary
Word Counts

Breakthrough: 3
Organization: 7
Strategy: 6
Sustainability: 4

So the next time some jackass on the Internet, say Andrew Hanson, tells you that college is great and not a complete waste of time and money, just look him in the eye and say "it's shit like this, Andy! It is SHIT like THIS."