Shakespeare speaks about Corporate Meetings

by Simon van der Wiel

I remember a book of quotations I used as an arsenal for my essays and articles in school days, to hit unsuspecting teachers with re-heated nuggets of borrowed wisdom.  Those were the days before Wikiquotes or ThinkExist made it ridiculously simple to integrate lines by a plethora of great minds into an original masterpiece. In those days, we had to laboriously look up either the topic in the contents or the author in the index to zero down on a suitable quote.

I could find the greatest of garrulous quoters of the past adorning the index in something that looked like this:

Shaw, George Bernard

10, 24, 55, 79, 133, 138-9,

162, 166, 177-9, 191, 211,

 213, 217, 223, 226, 238,

240-2, 251, 268, 271, 277,

290-3, 299, 300, 305, 311,

323

However, the system just did not work for the Swan of Avon. The compilers had given up the unequal struggle rather early in the game. Listed against Shakespeare, William in the index was a solitary word in italics passim.

His quotations appeared everywhere, with rare exceptions on every page. The Greatest Poet, the Greatest Playwright or simply, the Greatest Writer of the noble English language seems to have written on every topic of human interest, and several which interest perhaps no one. Not for nothing is he called, among his other names, the Myriad Minded Shakespeare. An index on him would probably amount to a separate chapter on its own. So the compliers were wise enough to sum it up neatly in one word.

Now, back in those carefree days I could not care less for the goings on in the corporate world, and never had the burning desire to leaf through and check whether the great mind had said something useful about how to run businesses, but recently, in my moments of contemplation – that is to say, senior management meetings – his corporate wisdom was suddenly revealed to me in a blinding flash.

The bard’s eye view of the future foretells with eerie accuracy the corporatisation of the world and the social evil of spending hours and hours cooped up in meeting rooms, time that could be used for making the world a better place.

In a famed short scene of just twelve lines, the masterly genius comes through with prophetic analysis of the what corporate meeting rooms would look like in another four hundred years. The quill, in a flash surreal brilliance, documents what can be called the first minutes of meeting.

It starts with something that accompanies every managerial session – noise and flashy presentations – something that the greatest of all writers allegorically terms thunder and lightning.

Next,  as the participants of the meeting enter, he cuts a long story short and moves to the only possible concrete result ever taken out of a meeting room.

“When shall we three meet again?”  The only question that can be pondered with any hope of an answer in the millions and millions of dark and mysterious rooms around the world with sleepy men installed on comfortable chairs, huddling together beside round tables.

“When the hurly-burly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.”  In amazing use of metaphors, Shakespeare does hint at the futility of wasting precious time when there is work to be done. Yes, he is all for a short one once the project is done and over with, retrospection, lessons learnt, but to gather again and again when the game is still underway is a strict no-no. Perceval, Verity and other commentators could have done well to dwell on this lesson, but whether it would have been included in managerial training sessions or not is a deep and dark question.

“That will be ere the set of sun.” Long before it was fashionable, the farsighted plume scribbles down the advent of the proverbial EOD. The witches call for the next meeting in now well known terms –before the end of day, the close of business.

Then comes the small thing of booking of the meeting room, and sending out the invitations. “Where the place, upon the heath. There to meet with MacBeth.” It was the subtle attention to detail with which the glorious pen documented the most mundane along with the most lofty.

 And once that is done, the following lines stun us with their detailed foretelling of how meetings would proceed otherwise.

“I come, Graymalkin.”

“Paddock calls.”

“Anon.”

Apart from the time, place and attendees of the next meeting, all that goes on in the gathering are cell phones ringing and calling the attendees away –leading some of them to leave immediately.

And they all depart with the most accurate description of the corporate environment ever penned in the history of the written word. A couplet that etches to perfection the depressing, fuzzy, uncertain cubicular life with its weird reward and recognition system.

“Fair is foul and foul is fair, hover through the fog and filthy air.”

Simon van der Wiel is a fictonal character from Arunabha Sengupta's novel The Best Seller.

Half Dutch, half Irish and brought up in the West Coast, he works for an Indian firm and interacts with Dutch clients.

His blogs dealing with Corporate Circus, some from the novel and some extrapolated from the storyline, can be found at Blog of Simple Simon

Who Moved my Revolution?

by 

Simon van der Wiel

Download an audio recording of Hilary Clinton’s Freedom of Internet Speech.  Or stream in some other internet inspired rebellion manifesto by current day thinkers represented by the likes of Jared Cohen, or visionaries such as Francis Fukuyama . The last named once proudly proclaimed 1989 to be the end of history.  

Close your eyes, forget the context and float away in the reassuring ramble. “Information freedom ... foundation for global progress ... tools in the hands of people for advancement .... deficiencies in the current market for innovation ... harnessing the power of connection technologies ... long term dividends from modest investments in innovation ... flat world ... connected communication ... Web 2.0”

The excessively empty jargon sounds like eerie approximations of McKinsey-speak. One can almost sense the darkened conference room, projectors beaming meaningless charts and data, with superfluous smatterings of inane inconsequential information on the screen.

The more Washington leans towards the Silicon Valley in rather puerile efforts to electronically re-simulate the samizdat operations of the Cold War era, the more the techno-mingled-drivel of such talks echo the colossal ignorance that reverberate across the corporate CEO meetings.

It is of little surprise that the Freedom of Internet speech of Hilary Clinton has been tagged by some alternative media sites with the keyword ‘ignorance’. Not unjustified. Asked about Twitter a few days before the Iranian revolution broke out, the leading lady had responded, “I wouldn’t know a Twitter from a tweeter, but evidently it’s very important.”

If one pauses for a moment of sanity amidst the furious beeps and clicks of a connected concept of cyber utopia, one cannot help but shudder at the thought of the world being liberated by leaders with self confessed unawareness of the very tools they claim to be magic pills.

We see at work the same wishful thinking with belligerent yet bird-brained buzzwords that characterise millions of Senior Management meetings. Only, in this case, the decision makers are people with phenomenal power, with actual ability to influence the world, who have in their hands technologically advanced and extremely interconnected tools that they do not understand. As discussed in another article, an email sent by one such ill advised policymaker to the administrators of a Social Media Tool can actually compromise the freedom and lives of actual dissidents across the world. Scary? It indeed is.

While the phrase ‘Internet Freedom’ is searched more frequently from Washington area than Iran and the fragmented former Soviet Union nations put together, the policy makers are gaga about the new social media avatars of the samizdat press and the Radio Europe movements that supposedly managed to crumble the Berlin Wall, and folded the Iron Curtain into storage rooms of a half remembered past.

Buzzwords – another very corporate phenomenon – raise their noisy heads with the ingratiating yet convincing smiles. The architectural magnificence and geographical prominence of the Great Wall of China lends itself to the creation of misleading metaphors such as Great Firewall. The legions of politicians for whom 1989 is a self proclaimed feather in semi-thinking caps, pronounce aphorisms influenced by another Wall:“As networks spread around the globe, virtual walls are cropping up in places of visible walls.”

Leaders who have smugly fitted  into the political power-works by manipulating the bipolar world prior to 1989 harp that the Iron Curtain has been replaced by “a new information curtain descending across much of the world” where it is claimed that “viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of the day.”

The dangers of such proclamations and the pitfalls of celebrating bloggers as modern day dissidents have been discussed in other articles of the issue, notably by my lovely friend Shruti Rattan. Here I am looking at the unnerving similarity of these declarations with similar decrees in the corporate world – where each and every company of the day is trying to chisel its social networking strategy into a silver bullet with the same chronic short term thinking that is the signature of the industry and, perhaps, the cause of cycles of booms and busts.

In the mid to late 90s, the software world was being steered by senior management made up of experts in third generation languages like COBOL. Simultaneously, there was a lot of excitement about the relatively new Object Oriented Technologies.  There lie in several archives of the industry huge quantities of code written in new generation syntax and semantics, feebly powered by old, procedural design. The platform of coding was changed to imprint the stamp of progress, but the erstwhile experts who engineered the changes often did not have the knowhow to benefit from the features of fourth generation object oriented languages. Enormous systems still chug along on these Jurassic algorithms in the then cutting edge outfit. The result has been a huge waste of money, manpower and efficiency.

In current events, we witness a similar trend in the political scenario. Historical parallels and inviting metaphors can make for great rhetoric, but it is ridculous to base decisions on wordplay and play havoc with the lives of other people.

Reusing the so called best practices of the pre 1989 era, implementing a blanket model that has supposedly worked in remarkably different conditions – along with a bull headed initiative to tweak every innovation into such propaganda are pathetic parallels of the uncommitted world of corporate cubicles.

While the oedipal obstinacy to come out of the cold war parentage while dealing with completely different global situations can be of professional interest to Freudian analysts, basic questions still remain about whether the samizdat offering of leaflets, propaganda, books, photocopies, Radio Europe and so on were actually driving forces behind the fall of communism. There have been arguments that people in GDR were more interested in shows like Miami Vice than in assembling for protests. Was it really the underground photocopiers, or was it the chain of events leading to plummeting oil industry and rising food prices that led to the wall going down in 1989? We are not discussing that here, although it would not be ill-advised to pause and think about it before tweeting propaganda.

In other articles we have pointed out why the current platform of Social Media, with its messy electronic footprints, is far more dangerous for the activist than Samizdat.  We have also dealt with the online version of slacktivists, reverse propaganda and the effect of cheap entertainment triumphing over dissidence. Here I would like to add that millions of connections between millions of people on the internet is a very, very complicated affair. Generalised optimistic jargon filled proclamations about cyber utopia and the messianic merits of the Socially Networked World can be fine for fifteen minutes of spotlight. But, no one can honestly predict the future of such a connected world yet.

The complexity of the electronic mesh that entangles everyone consists of too many parameters. It is prone to the chaotic phenomenon where small changes create immense domino effects. It is impossible to predict which way such a connected world will react to the ripples, through integration or falling to bits.

Till such a time that we can form an informed prediction in this information chaos, it may be a good idea to take the deafening optimistic sound and fury about cyber rebellion with the same cynical nonchalance with which we attend management review meetings.

*

Simon van der Wiel is a fictonal character from Arunabha Sengupta's novel The Best Seller.

Half Dutch, half Irish and brought up in the West Coast, he works for an Indian firm and interacts with Dutch clients.

His blogs dealing with Corporate Circus, some from the novel and some extrapolated from the storyline, can be found at Blog of Simple Simon