Chicken soup and olive trees
No, this isn’t a recipe. This is about think tanks.
Seven Oaks Magazine has an interesting piece on the fluffy side of public-policy consulting, taking as examples a bunch of U.K. consultancies.
No need to name names here. Yep, that’s the one.
I must confess I haven’t read the olive tree, though <blush> I do read Friedman’s columns regularly and find them <blush> <blush> quite good.The problem with the Kanes and the Leadbetters of this world is their zealous insistence on an online, open source technological, networked cyber-utopia which confuses familiarity with the fads of the day with serious critical enquiry. The result of which is a drunken misalliance of Chicken Soup for the Soul touchy-feely network spiritualism and the crass market genuflecting offered up in books like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s best-selling business bible The Lexus and the Olive Tree.
But the point I want to make is really something else, and I’ve touched on it in earlier posts about how we deal with information and how unglamorous the process of writing is. Here’s my point: if you spend most of your time producing copy for glossy reports and talking on TV, or perhaps on the phone to reporters, when do you actually get your real job done — thinking? Reminds me of The Sheltering Sky, this beautiful, infuriatingly flawed movie (has Bertolucci made any others?) whose protagonist, Port Moresby, is a composer.
How often do we see him composing?
Once. (We see him decomposing for the rest of the movie, though.)
Point: writing or most forms of intellectual or artistic production are inherently boring for the outsider, and they’re boring because they’re hard work. We don’t live in a time where hard work is valued because we thrive on products that are of the moment, for the moment. Who would fund “serious critical enquiry” if it takes so much time and has very unpredictable outcomes?
God, I sound like one of those anti-globalization idiots.
Speaking of consultants, check out Martin Kihn’s stuff over at Fast Forward. His Consultant Debunking Unit, or CDU, is brilliant, and I can’t wait to get a hold of his forthcoming book, House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time (Warner Books).
