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It is my job to write about management trends and working life, and it seems that I have been writing about the values of the 1960s for a very long time.
It didn't happen at once. Indeed it took business about 20 years to work out that the 1960s had happened at all. When I joined the workforce in 1981, the culture was much the same as it had been in the 1950s: hierarchical and stable.
Jobs were still meant to be for life. But 1968 happened in offices around about 1988, and in 2008 the ideas of the 1960s are still affecting the ways we behave and think at work.
As Anthony Dworkin pointed out in the current issue of Prospect magazine, these ideas have now become enshrined in the workplace ideal that business schools preach.
Empowerment, creativity, team-work, life-long learning, values and visions: all these ideas had their roots in the 1960s. Students got over it. Business never has.
Some of these ideas have turned into a good thing in workplaces, others less so. The business equivalent of free love is job hopping, which means that employees can get into bed with any old employer and if it doesn't work out they can dump them and move on.
In moderation this is good; in excess it is expensive for employers and destabilising for employees.
Instant gratification
The idea of instant, and constant, gratification was also a big thing in the 1960s, but is not so good when translated to work. Jobs are often dull, and so if we expect the earth to move for us every time. We end up feeling cheated and disappointed when it doesn't.
Above all what characterised the 1960s was people pretending to be cool when they were actually quite square.
The same now applies to most corporate executives. They speak a language infected with the spirit of the 1960s because they think it sounds good, not because they really mean it.
My favourite example is the JP Morgan manager who instructed investment bankers to "take the time today to call a client and tell them you love them". Peace and love proved a dodgy dictum even when applied to students. When applied to bankers it beggars belief.
Less extreme but more revealing was an e-mail forwarded to me last week and written by Devin Wenig, the new CEO of the markets division of the newly merged Thomson Reuters.
Unwelcome blend
This message strikes me as a perfect example of the standard, professional memo that successful executives like to write. It is also an extraordinary hybrid: corporate jargon overlaid on 1960s hippy talk.
The result is repulsive. The point of the memo was to reassure customers that most of the services pre-merger will still be available to them post-merger; that the company is interested in their views; that it will try to improve its service. Simple stuff.
But it is expressed like this. Wenig says the company's goal is to "develop deeper and richer innovative solutions".
"Delivery" and "solutions" are newish, but the rest is straight from the 1960s with its insistence on creativity and compulsory hyperbole.
Indeed, the 1960s was the decade when adjectival inflation took hold. Until then something could be merely 'good'; the 1960s made it 'fabulous', 'great' or 'sensational'.
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