Headlines:
I went to a McKinsey seminar at Versailles in the autumn of 1998. The
result was this, my first piece of real commercial writing. Back then,
most of the readers of Real Business had not heard of 'first mover advantage'
while a number of FT readers must now be wishing they never had. Funny how
some of these phrases, which were neologisms in 1998, have stuck and some have
disappeared completely.
Last month, I
went to a thinly disguised recruitment exercise presented as a kind of
management seminar. A top-drawer
firm of management consultants laid it on and they had invited me and three
dozen sparks to an all-expenses-paid weekend in Paris. I got some useful insights about management - and it would be hard to
beat the price - but the main 'take-home' was a kit bag full of phrases and
words that were new to me. I
thought it would be useful to share a few of them before they get complained
about on the Today programme.
- GSD. Gets shit done, as in "He's a GSD guy".
- Clicks and Mortar. A non-Internet company runs in real space in buildings made of bricks and
mortar. Much of the hype about
Internet companies is that they are 'virtual' - they have no buildings, no
overheads but lots of subcontractors. The
idea of a 'clicks and mortar' company is a kind of hybrid of the two. In other words, an Internet company turns the cash it raises from going
public into bricks and mortar in order to raise some barriers to entry behind it
and to intimidate potential and actual competitors.
- Third place. Starbucks isn't your home and it isn't your work - it's a third place
where you can meet people and interact with them in an analogue way. Digital communities, like chat rooms, can also provide a 'third place'.
- Customer touch points. When British Airways delay your flight, lose your luggage and pretend
it's your fault - these are all customer touch points.
- Meta-strategy. This is a strategy for creating strategies.
- Narrowcast. When you get a letter saying "you have been chosen because of your
eating habits to join the select few who carry the new Banana card" this is
narrowcast junk mail.
- Take-home. What we used to call a lesson, as in the 'the main take-home from this
article is a lot of new words'.
- Rabbit hole. This is a reference to Alice in Wonderland, as in "let's not talk
about clicks and mortar - I don't even want to go down that particular Rabbit
Hole" because doing so would result in existential confusion for the
speaker or listener.
- Network effect. This phrase encapsulates the idea that one fax machine is useless and but
that two are useful and that the value of each fax machine increases
exponentially in proportion to the number of other fax machines.
- Heathrow University. A dismissive term that management consultants use to the source and
marketplace for pulp management theories.
- Points of Inflection. I have no idea what this means but it sounds good.
- Influence activity. Manipulating a bonus system, for example by sucking up to a boss, rather
than actually doing the thing that the bonus system is designed to encourage.
A classic example of this occurred before I changed my company's bonus
system. One of the criteria which
the old system judged was initiative. One
person came and asked for a very generous pay rise and said that he was
demonstrating initiative in doing so.
- Throw-weight. This phrase comes from the baroque terminology of the cold war - it
originally meant the nuclear payload of a missile. Now it means brand or market power.
- First mover advantage. The triumph of optimism over inexperience.
What an Internet innovator does that justifies their market capitalisation.
- Space. A market sector, e.g. 'we're
in the kid's software space'.
- Profit pools. In a particular space there is money to be made and this money is
described as a profit pool (just waiting for some start-up to kill the
mosquitoes and drain the pool of profit).
- Eat their lunch. This is an old Microsoft favourite which is now surfacing in other
places. Eating someone's lunch
means moving into their market space and draining their profit pools usually
because your throw-weight exceeds their first mover advantage.
- Play. A business project. For
example Amazon.com is an Internet book retailing play. By the same analogy I suppose that eToys.com is child's play.
- Net net. The aggregate result of a diverse range of interrelated
decisions. For example: "the
net net of moving into this space with an Internet play will be an increase in
profitability".
- Round zero. Venture capital fund-raising goes through several stages or rounds.
Round zero is the phase before you actually try to raise any money
because you're still thinking up the right play.
- Hard stop. Used during a meeting to set an end-time for the meeting, as in 'I have a
hard stop at 2.30pm." As an
ex-programmer, I would call this a non-maskable interrupt.
However
powerful (or absurd) these phrases are, they are in the shadow of two new ones I
heard recently. The first was used
to describe a technological marvel that was about to be revealed to me - my
client promised to "open the kimono on that later". This must surely be a reference to that scene in The Crying Game in which
case you may not be pleased to see what's behind the kimono. The second is used by trophy chairmen of Internet companies when
discussing which of several Internet plays to back - "I haven't decided
where to put my Mojo yet."
The day after
we all arrived the entire team of contestants for Miss World France checked in
to the hotel. This was very popular
amongst most of the delegates. I
momentarily wondered if this had been contrived to add to the 'cool' of the
whole event but subsequently decided the thought was unworthy. As for management consultancy: although I have never met so many
fascinating "insecure overachievers" (as they accurately describe
themselves) and there is something charming about the commercial pursuit of pure
wisdom, I am putting my Mojo elsewhere for the time being.
Writer