Sewitch Etcetera Corporation

I’ve written to you about my MAGA friend, but it’s been a while. We are meeting for lunch Friday for one of our periodic confabs.

Brian and I go back maybe 30 years. I met him when I was an advisor to a company he worked for. I had a consulting company for many years, and one day a client of ours, where Brian worked, called and said that they had a shooting at the company, a dead employee, law enforcement onsite and wondered what they should do for the employees who witnessed one of their co-workers killed.

Carlin had a perspective of humanity driven by the counter-culture zeitgeist of his era and probably assisted by the mind-altering effects of hallucinogens. His early material centered on nonsensical language–what words mean and don’t mean, which words are arbitrarily acceptable and which are not–how we use language to obfuscate, to appear erudite and smart.

Nowhere is such language more opaque, while at the same time impressive to the ear, than the jargon of business. Here is something I read this morning on my LinkedIn feed, related to artificial intelligence and its development as a tool for productivity in a business:

“It takes work to reimagine workflows, upskill and build capability, establish governance, and build a stable, scalable tech platform to see tangible outcomes and value creation gains. This cannot be done in sequential steps but rather constant parallel pathing, and this work is real, tangible and frankly hard.”