The Economist May 14th 2022 Business 63F
ire-fighting foamstarves the
flames of oxygen. A handful of over
used words have the same deadening
effect on people’s ability to think. These
are words like “innovation”, “collabora
tion”, “flexibility”, “purpose” and “sus
tainability”. They coat consultants’ web
sites, blanket candidates’ cvs and spray
from managers’ mouths. They are ano
dyne to the point of being useless.
These words are ubiquitous in part
because they are so hard to argue against.
Who really wants to be the person mak
ing the case for silos? Which executive
secretly thirsts to be chief stagnation
officer? Is it even possible to have pur
poselessness as a goal? Just as Karl Pop
per, a philosopher, made falsifiability a
test of whether a theory could be de
scribed as scientific, antonymy is a good
way to work out whether an idea has any
value. Unless its opposite could possibly
have something to recommend it, a word
is too woolly to be truly helpful.
Woolliness is the enemy of accuracy
as well as utility. A word like “sustain
ability” is so fuzzy that it is used to en
compass everything from a business that
thinks sensibly about the long term to
the end of capitalism. This column may
well count as sustainable because it
keeps recycling the same ideas. The lack
of precision opens the door to grand
standing and greenwashing. Earlier this
year Morningstar, a data provider, culled
1,200 funds from its European sustain
ableinvestment list after a closer review
of their prospectuses and annual reports.
Regulators in America and Europe have
been scrambling to define standards of
sustainability disclosure.
Woolliness also smothers debate
about whether you can have too much of
a good thing. Take “innovation”, for
example. Too much innovation can be aturnoff for customers. A recent paper
from Yingyue Luan and Yeun Joon Kim of
the Judge Business School at the Univer
sity of Cambridge looks at the effect of
perceived novelty on the response of
audiences to films. The researchers find
that there is a sweet spot in experimenta
tion, where films are distinctive enough to
pique curiosity but not so radical that they
upend expectations. In that space be
tween “Home Alone 4” and “Tenet” lie the
real moneymaking opportunities.
Innovation can also be trying for em
ployees. Researchers at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (mit) recently
looked at factors that predicted high levels
of attrition among companies’ work
forces. To their surprise, they found that
employees were more likely to leave
firms—like Tesla and Nvidia—with high
levels of innovation. The authors hypothe
sise that the long hours and high pressure
that typify innovative cultures can lead to
higher staff turnover.
“Collaboration” is another word that
repays closer scrutiny. It can be marvel
lous: boundaries dissolved, expertise andideas flowing. But collaboration can also
run wild. It often means having more
and more people on every email thread
and in every meeting. It can paralyse
decisionmaking, as everyone and their
dog gets to weigh in with their view. (To
be fair, the dog often makes the most
useful points.)
And the rewards that flow from col
laborativeness are uneven. “The No
Club”, a new book by Linda Babcock,
Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund and Lau
rie Weingart, examines the dispropor
tionate amount of “nonpromotable
work” done by women—tasks like cover
ing absences, organising logistics and
mentoring. Collaboration is a much less
attractive proposition if helping others
means spending less time on the sort of
work that gets recognised when it is time
to hand out actual promotions.
A host of other woolly words also
mask genuine tradeoffs. The supremely
fluffy notion of “purpose” disguises
hardedged questions of how managers
should balance the interests of multiple
stakeholders. “Flexibility” sounds like a
boon to workers, but the reality for em
ployees of coping with lastminute
changes to schedules is often very differ
ent. The mitstudy found that having a
regular schedule was six times more
powerful as a predictor of bluecollar
employee retention than having a flex
ible schedule.
Traits like innovativeness or collab
orativeness are still qualities for firms to
aspire to. And this is not an argument for
constant qualification of what is meant:
the one way to make “purpose” more
annoying is to put the word “smart” in
front of it. But it is a plea for managers to
use woolly words thoughtfully. They are
not going away, but they do not have to
suffocate mental activity.Innovation. Sustainability. Purpose. YuckBartlebyThe woolliest words in business
early adopters of surveillance tech, inten
sive monitoring of performance contribut
ed to emotional exhaustion, depression
and high employee turnover. In a separate
survey of 2,000 remote and hybrid workers
in America by Expressvpn, a virtual private
network, over a third faced pressure to ap
pear more productive or to work longer
hours as a result of being monitored. A
fifth felt dehumanised, nearly half pre
tended to be online and almost a third em
ployed antisurveillance software, specifi
cally designed to dodge online monitoring.
Add concerns about privacy—especial
ly as the snooping shifts from the office to
the home—and no wonder that workers
are wary. According to a survey in 2018 by
Britain’s Trades Union Congress, an um
brella group, only one in four workers
thought monitoring offered more benefits
than downsides. Three in four viewed
facialrecognition software as inappropri
ate. They had similar concerns about the
monitoring of their socialmedia use out
side work hours and using webcams to spy
on them. Gartner, a consultancy, last year
found that employees in nine large econo
mies consistently favoured nondigitalmonitoring, such as inperson checkins
by managers, to the digital sort. Only 16%
of French workers felt that any form of dig
ital surveillance was acceptable.
With laws like New York’s coming into
force, lots of employees are about to learn
that their employers’ views on the appro
priateness of such methods may be quite
distinct from their own. Employers, for
their part, may need to temper their enthu
siasm for snooping on staff. Most compa
nies will probably arrive at a sensiblecom
promise. Those that don’t may find thattoo
much knowledge is a dangerous thing.n