Thursday, August 23, 2007

Business Bureaucratese

Our analysis showed that significant cost savings could be realized by incenting your project managers to realize additional cost cutting initiatives.

I don't know what it is about MBA students that makes them write in a style that no one wants to read. This sentence on their first homework assignment inspired me to assign Fred Kahn's classic "My War Against Bureaucratese," the gobbledygook written by government bureaucrats designed to hide what they are really doing.

Professor Kahn began this war as part of his succesful effort to deregulate the airline industry. He is the hero of Thomas McCraw's Pulitzer Prize Winning book Prophets of Regulation. Interestingly, the villain of the book is Louis Brandeis for his role in creating the FTC. From a review of the book:

Brandeis…became bogged down between the constraints of his own ill-considered anti-big business ideology, his lack of understanding regarding the economic properties of industrial structure and behavior, and his reliance on the efficacy of due process legal procedures.… The ultimate result of Brandeis’s involvement was a regulatory process ripe for decay…

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