angelophile | Old Snake-Oil, New Bottles... (Reply)

I've got to the section in 'How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World' on Success manuals and the 'new thinking' way of management. It's making for good reading (more so than the earlier chapter on 980s economics which didn't really interest me as much.

It'd be funnier if it wasn't so tragic...

The market for platitudes became so crowded that ever more exotic angles were required to catch the eye of airport browsers. In the words of Mike Fuller, author of Above the Bottom Line, 'you have to have a shtick of some kind'. One promising approach, as the emphasis shifted from 'management' to 'leadership', was to seek out historical analogies...

The pioneer here was Wess Robert (or Wess Robert PhD as he styled himself, forgetting that non-medical 'doctors' who insist on drawing attention to their postgraduate qualification - Henry Kissinger in the US, Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland - always bring disaster in their wake: it's tantamount to having the warning 'This Man is Dangerous' tattooed on one's forehead).

Robert's book 'The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun' appeared in 1991 and soon found its way on to the bookshelves of every middle manager in the United States. Described as a 'fantastic' guide which 'will help you make the most of your leadership potential', it vouchsafed these truly fantastic discoveries: 'You must have resilience to overcome personal misfortunes, discouragement, rejection and disappointment'; 'When the consequences of your actions are too grim to bear, look for another option.'

Could anything be sillier? You bet: other authors have since come up with Gandhi: The Heart of an Executive, Confucius in the Boardroom, If Aristotle Ran General Motors, Make It So: Management Lessons from 'Star Trek the Next Generation', Elizabeth I CEO and Moses: CEO. The Ten Commandments, we now learn, were the world's first mission statement...

Reeling from his party's defeat by Newt Gingrich's Republicans in the previous month's congressional elections, the President himself summoned no fewer than five feel good authors to help him 'search for a way back'. Marianne Williamson, a glamorous Hollywood mystic; Jean Houston, a self-styled 'sacred psychologist' whose fourteen books included Life Force: The PsychoHistorical Recovery of the Self, and her friend Mary Catherine Bateson, an anthropology professor whose study of 'non-traditional life paths' had been praised by Hillary Clinton.

This quintet of sages asked the president to describe his best qualities. 'I have a good heart,' he said. 'I really do. And I hope I have a decent mind.' As they talked long into the night, and all the following day, the conversation was increasingly dominated by Hillary's problems - the constant personal attacks she endured, and the failure of her plan to reform health-care. Jean Houston, who felt that 'being Hillary Clinton was like being Mozart with his hands cut off; informed the First Lady that she was 'carrying the burden of 5,000 years of history when women were subservient... She was reversing thousands of years of expectation and was there up front, probably more than virtually any woman in human history - apart from Joan of Arc.'

The latter-day Joan was understandably flattered. Over the next six months Houston and Bateson often visited Hilary Clinton in Washington, urging her to talk to the spirits of historical figures who would understand her troubles and thus help her 'achieve self 'healing'. Sitting with her two psychic counsellors at a circular table in the White House solarium, she held conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt (her 'spiritual archetype') and Mahatma Gandhi ('a powerful symbol of stoic self-denial'). It was only when Houston proposed speaking to Jesus Christ - 'the epitome of the wounded, betrayed and isolated' - that Hillary called a halt. 'That', she explained, 'would be too personal.' The reticence seems rather puzzling: don't millions of Christians speak to Jesus, both publicly and privately, through their prayers?

In the UK perhaps the most remarkable manifestation of New Labour's guru-worship, they were joined by Dr Edward de Bono, whose task was 'to develop bright ideas on schools and jobs'.

In the autumn of 1998 more than 200 officials from the Department of Education were treated to a lecture from de Bono on his 'Six Thinking Hats system' of decision-making. The idea, he explained, was that civil servants should put on a red hat when they wanted to talk about 'hunches and instinct', a yel1ow hat if they were listing the advantages of a project, a black hat while playing devil's advocate, and so on.

'Without wishing to boast,' he added, 'this is the first new way of thinking to be developed for 2,400 years since the days of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle.' In similarly unboastful fashion, de Bono often says that he invented 'lateral thinking' - which is like claiming to have invented poetry, or humour, or grief _ and takes pride in having devised a system of 'water logic'.

Here is an example of water logic in action: 'How often does someone who is using a traditional wet razor stop to consider whether instead of moving the razor it might be easier to keep the razor stil1 and to move the head instead? In fact it is rather better. But no one does try it because there is "no problem to fix"'

If his pupils in Whitehall tried this shaving technique they would soon discover why it hasn't caught on: the result looks like an out-take from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

So far as can be discovered, the education department has yet to order those coloured hats, but no doubt it benefited from his other creative insights: 'You can't dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper'; 'With a problem, you look for a solution'; 'A bird is different from an aeroplane, although both fly through the air.'

Painful.