How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions. Francis Wheen

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СКАЧАТЬ his staff to a seminar with Doug Hall, author of Jump Start Your Brain. ‘Hall blasted the old Sam the Sham song “Woolly Bully” in the committee room,’ the Washington Post reported, ‘while the staffers shot at one another with Nerf guns.’

      No wonder President Clinton remained so stubbornly popular, however many scandals buffeted his reputation: his dabblings in alternative psychology and New Age management techniques must have been a great reassurance to many fellow-citizens who had previously felt slightly shamefaced about their own dalliance with Deepak Chopra or Anthony Robbins. As Newsweek pointed out when the story of Hillary’s chats with ghosts eventually leaked, ‘From Atlantic Richfield to Xerox, corporate America has spent millions every year putting managers through the same kind of exercises in personal transformation the Clintons have been sampling for free. Houston herself has run seminars for the Department of Commerce and other federal agencies. At Stanford Business School, Prof. Michael Ray has prepared future captains of industry with Tarot cards and chants to release their deeper selves.’

      Everyone was at it. In Britain, allegedly the home of the stiff upper lip, the loopier manifestations of soul-baring may have been mocked but managerial mumbo-jumbo found an eager market. By 1995 the British government was spending well over £100 million a year on management consultants, as branches of officialdom were forcibly transformed into ‘agencies’. What had once been straightforward public services, such as the health system or the BBC, acquired their own internal markets – which in turn created new blizzards of paperwork and extra layers of bureaucracy, all in the name of efficiency. The ensuing chaos was best described by an official inquiry into the semi-privatised British prison service, commissioned after two murderers and an arsonist escaped from Parkhurst jail in January 1995: ‘Any organisation which boasts one Statement of Purpose, one Vision, five Values, six Goals, seven Strategic Priorities and eight Key Performance Indicators without any clear correlation between them is producing a recipe for total confusion and exasperation.’ The home secretary promptly sacked the director-general of the prison service, Derek Lewis, a businessman who knew nothing about jails or indeed public administration. Lewis was understandably puzzled: the same government which recruited him three years earlier to give the penal system a dose of management theory had now punished him for doing just that.

      This fiasco did nothing to dampen the Tories’ enthusiasm for merchants of gimmickry and gobbledegook; and the only difference made by the election of New Labour in 1997 was that that the Blairites seemed even more susceptible. Government spending on private consultants rose by 25 per cent in both 1998–9 and 1999–2000, and by more than 50 per cent the following year – from £360 million to £550 million. The recipients of this largesse could hardly believe their luck. ‘Go back two or three years,’ the trade journal Management Consultancy commented in August 2001, ‘and it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to find anyone anticipating an increase in spending of that magnitude from the state.’ Not so: Tony Blair had never concealed his reverence for management gurus. In the summer of 1996 he despatched 100 Labour frontbenchers to a weekend seminar at Templeton College, Oxford, where a posse of partners from Andersen Consulting lectured the wannabe ministers on ‘total quality service’ and ‘the management of change’. (The veteran Labour politician Lord Healey, who also spoke at the event, was unimpressed: ‘These management consultants are just making money out of suckers.’) When Blair entered Downing Street, several executives from Andersen – and McKinseys, the other leading management consultancy-were seconded to Whitehall with a brief to practise ‘blue skies thinking’. Soon afterwards, in 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 instincts, a yellow 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 still 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.’

      Who could disagree? Gurus are safe enough while peddling ancient clichés disguised as revolutionary new strategies. It is when they seek out instances of this wisdom in action that they come a cropper: the entrepreneur-as-hero often turns out to be merely human after all. In his 1985 book Tactics: The Art and Science of Success, Edward de Bono offered the lessons that might be learned from a number of people who ‘would generally be regarded as “successful” ’. After studying these inspiring examples, ‘the reader should say, “Why not me?”’ The millionaires he extolled included US hotelier Harry Helmsley, later convicted of massive tax evasion, and Robert Maxwell, subsequently exposed as one of the most outrageous fraudsters in British history.

      One of the Thatcherites’ most frequently repeated injunctions in the 1980s was that until Britain learned to love wealth-creators it was doomed to economic decline. As the Tory minister Lord Young said in 1987 while presenting the Guardian’s, Young Businessman of the Year Award, there is a ‘strong anti-business, anti-entrepreneurial streak’ in British society. (Not that it deterred his lordship: soon afterwards he left the Cabinet for the lusher pastures of the chairman’s office at Cable & Wireless.) Jonathan Aitken, another wealthy Conservative, made the same point twenty years earlier in his book The Young Meteors. ‘One reason why we are so ill-equipped on any level to compete in manufacturing fields’, he argued, ‘is that as a nation we are only just beginning to regard profit-making through manufacturing as respectable.’ To conquer this lingering prejudice, he drew attention to some thoroughly respectable entrepreneurs – such as Gerald Ronson, aged twenty-seven, ‘one of Britain’s youngest self-made property millionaires’, and Jim Slater, the ‘brilliantly successful’ founder of Slater-Walker. Slater-Walker later performed so brilliantly that it had to be bailed out by the Bank of England, and Jim Slater was found guilty of fifteen offences under the Companies Act. Gerald Ronson, not to be outdone, served a term in Ford open prison for his participation in an illegal share-ramping operation. The catalogue of woe was completed in June 1999 when Jonathan Aitken himself, who had served as a Cabinet minister until 1995, was jailed for perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice.

      Hence the traditional British resistance to the allegedly aphrodisiac qualities of tycoons: we can’t help suspecting that they wear their socks in bed and snore all night. Even those politicians and pundits who approve in principle of capitalist self-enrichment will often join the chorus of insults directed against ‘fat cats’ who put the theory into practice, and the few attempts to idolise business chieftains have invariably ended in embarrassment. Consider the fate of the London-based American author Jeffrey Robinson, who has tried for years to persuade his adopted country that cigar-chomping magnates are sexy. In 1985, the high noon of Thatcherism, he published The Risk Takers, a collection of conversations with British businessmen who ‘turn me on’. Gerald Ronson once again paraded himself for our titillation (‘a man with a proven knack for making money’), as did Robert Maxwell. ‘He is’, Robinson announced, СКАЧАТЬ