(^34) Best columns: Business
“Why do corporations speak the way they do?”
asked Molly Young. After freelancing for a year
in the mid-2000s, I returned to office life, and one
thing I realized I had not missed was the language.
My epiphany arrived shortly after I first heard the
term “parallel path” in a sentence: “We’re waiting
on specs for the San Francisco installation. Can you
parallel-path two versions?” All it meant was to do
two things at once. Like other “corporate neolo-
gisms,” it just sounded fake and self-important and
had no reason to exist. There are different terms for
this kind of language: corporate-speak, buzzwords,
or, my favorite, garbage language. Like other trash,
garbage language is “produced mindlessly in the
course of our days” and “it smells horrible and
looks ugly.” But unlike regular trash, this kind of
language—operationalize, touchpoint, business-
critical—is also designed to trick and conceal. These
are “words with a scammy flavor.” They are “weap-
onized” by corporate bureaucrats to “bewilder, em-
barrass, and penalize” the people beneath them. And
the worst part of it is that in the office we go along
with this because “it’s safer to use words that signify
nothing and can be stretched to mean anything.”
When companies ask why they have trouble retain-
ing women, they’re usually told that it’s because they
don’t provide enough tools for work-life balance, said
Robin Ely and Irene Padavic. Both men and women
overwhelmingly say that “women’s devotion to fam-
ily makes it impossible for them to put in” the hours
to advance to the executive ranks. So to solve the
problem of “women’s stalled advancement,” employ-
ers seek to offer “accommodations, such as going
part-time and shifting to internally facing roles.” The
effect of this is “perverse”: In an 18-month in-house
study we did for one consulting company, “employ-
ees who took advantage of such accommodations—
virtually all of whom were women—were stigmatized
and saw their careers derailed.” In reality, parents of
both sexes at the firm we studied were deeply dis-
tressed over their work-family conflicts. “I was trav-
eling three days a week and seeing my children once
or twice a week for 45 minutes before they went to
bed,” one man we spoke with told us about an espe-
cially bad patch. After listening to workers, we told
the company that what it needed to fix wasn’t spe-
cific to women. It was the firm’s whole work culture
with its “relentless demand for 24/7 availability.” The
company didn’t want to hear it. It dismissed the data,
and our engagement effectively ended. AP (2)
Drowning
in garbage
language
Molly Young
New York
Fix work for
everyone, not
just women
Robin Ely and
Irene Padavic
Harvard Business Review
You don’t need millions in the bank to be-
come a client at Morgan Stanley anymore,
said Greg Iacurci in CNBC.com—all you
need to have now is an E-Trade account.
Last week the Wall Street investment bank
agreed on a $13 billion purchase of the
discount brokerage. E-Trade, with 5.2 mil-
lion customers, was once a revolutionary
platform that “helped usher in a dramatic
shift among financial services firms” and
fueled the rise of indexes and exchange-
traded funds, making investing vastly easier
for do-it-yourself investors. If approved,
the deal—“the biggest bank takeover since the 2008 financial
crisis”—would put Morgan’s blue-chip “financial advice at the
fingertips of a population that hadn’t previously had access.” For
Morgan, these new customers are a chance to “steady the ship,”
said The Economist. A decade ago, two-thirds of Morgan’s prof-
its came out of buying and selling securities. That high-stakes
strategy produces “large, lumpy sums when markets are strong,”
but it’s not a dependable source of revenue. Wealth management
actually brought in more money last year, and Morgan is betting
that IT will become “the bank’s main business.”
To hear liberals tell it, the whole story of finance is “Wall Street
getting richer as folks on Main Street scrape by,” said The Wall
Street Journal in an editorial. So why are Morgan Stanley and
Goldman Sachs, a couple of the most revered names on Wall
Street, so eager for E-Trade’s Main Street customers? Despite
constant liberal sniping, wealth growth isn’t confined to the top
1 percent; stock and mutual fund holdings for the rest of Amer-
i ca have doubled since 2010. The people benefiting from share
buy backs and increasing dividends are ordinary Amer i cans. And
Wall Street’s most prestigious banks believe
that trend will continue. That’s why they’re
“making long bets on the middle class
becoming richer.” Mor gan Stan ley buying
E-Trade and Gold man offering no-fee bank
accounts are ways to get to middle-class
investors while they are still building wealth.
Mor gan Stan ley also knows that young
people “only want to interact with the
bank digitally,” said Brian Chappatta in
Bloomberg .com. E-Trade gives Mor gan
access to digital natives and their “emerg-
ing wealth.” Get them into the fold early
and they’ll be more likely to eventually “move over to the bank’s
existing wealth-management offerings once they accumulate more
money and need a robust financial plan.”
For Morgan Stanley’s brokers, buying E-Trade is like “invit-
ing cannibals in for dinner,” said John Foley in BreakingViews
.com. After all, it’s discount brokerages like E-Trade that killed
brokerages’ traditional source of revenue. But it’s worth it for
Morgan Stanley to steal the opportunity from Goldman Sachs.
There’s a decades-old rivalry between the two investment banks.
Both are trying to expand to a broader base of customers, and
this is a chance for Morgan to put Goldman “on the back foot.”
Let’s just hope E-Trade and Morgan Stanley’s clients win in this,
too, said Jason Zweig in The Wall Street Journal. “Much as the
Plains Indians used every part of the buffalo, from flesh to skin
to horn to sinew and hooves,” brokerages have become increas-
ingly adept at finding new strategies for harvesting money, even
as stock-trading commissions fall to zero. Investors who don’t
want to get skinned should keep asking themselves if they’re get-
ting the best deal.
Mergers: Morgan Stanley chases the middle class
Marriage of convenience
nancy kaufman
(Nancy Kaufman)
#1