Sunday, May 23, 2010

Business Bullshit and Art Bullshit

Many kinds of business - in fact most I suspect - are about lying to yourself and other people so frequently that eventually both you and they believe it... not in the depths of their being, but believe it enough to buy it, both literally and metaphorically. I will collect some choice example of business bullshit in this post over the coming weeks, perhaps along with suitable translations in truth-lish. Let's start with a few mild ones, and then progress to some bigger whoppers.

"We are currently experiencing high call volumes" (even if you phone the call centre between 3:00 and 4:00 am in the morning, when only thieves and night shift workers are awake)

"Coles really cares about you"

"For best results make sure you only use Epson genuine ink cartridges" i.e for the best share results for Epson

Our core business is getting and keeping people Healthy (Adrian Gore, CEO of Discovery health, ie. money has nothing to do with it, although we can't help making millions of it on the side, but that's incidental - and who knows, maybe it really is?)

We're changing things at Telstra (we're spending even more on marketing so that tens of thousands of dissatisfied customers with no-one to talk to can be replaced by a new cohort of suckers)

For further examples from the world of management see Rodney Marks's blog http://comedian.com.au/blog/


Art bullshit


"In her work she interrogates the ideas of / the artist explores the notions of fakery and fraudulence..."

Translation: this person, like many of us, has a few thoughts about issues that are in the public domain, and, not being able to formulate a coherent and directional theis about them, through out a few random phrases - leaving the burden of meaning and interpretation on us - this stunted articulation of not very interesting observations is a royal, a mega, cop out....beginning of note to Heckler?


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