Dragovision and Subway Station

A very good friend of mine went to the University of Illinois, Urbana Champagne to study Electrical Engineering. At a physics class there, the Asian professor kept talking about “Dragovision” and “Subway Station” to the absolute mystification of my friend. Finally the epiphany broke: “Dragovision” was really “Drag Coefficient” and “Subway Station” was really “Surface Tension”. All became clear.

In the specialized worlds we live in, we are peppered by “Dragovisions” and “Subway Stations”. Only they come dressed up as “Market Spaces”, “Best Practice”, “Thought Leadership” and such. Someone needs to provide the Rosetta Stone to convert these into the ordinary language and common sense that lies at the heart of business success.

My father-in-law, once the senior-most officer for acquisition and procurement for Indian Railways, likes to tell the story of the self-made businessman who addressed the several thousands of workers at his multi-million dollar rail wagon factory. “What do we make?” he asked his workers. “Wagons!” came back the reply. He shook his head and then called out the real answer, “We make MONEY!” In his simple mind, he was very clear about his objective and could articulate it with a single sentence. His leadership and his strategies were all centered around that single focus.

Our world is made up of intelligent, highly educated and complex thinkers managing other people’s money and businesses. Too often, the “other people” tend to be stockholders who do not have the wherewithal or the capacity to correct our focus. We become an end unto ourselves, in love with the complex schemes we create.

We gather like minded complex thinkers and speakers around us and soon we are all talking in “tongues”. We as Business School majors with our freshly minted MBAs and our portfolio of “sock-it-to-them” terminology are very comfortable trading cryptic messages with others of our ilk. We as Enterprise Architects are happy talking data architecture, applications architecture, business architecture, Zachman Framework, Technical Reference Model, Framework, and other such terms of secret handshake with fellow architects. In the web programming world, it is the same with widgets, Java, dynamic HTML and the bubble du jour.

Ultimately we crowd out the simple minded or the simple talkers, like weeds overtaking the lawn, and convince the world that what business needs is a special breed of people who have the jargon down and the networks of other like minded people in place – in short MBAs from the B-schools, or perpetually recycled captains of industry. We command princely wages for the commanding speeches we make and the seminars we lead and the keynote addresses we provide and the grand plans we announce with fanfare.

We take simple mission statements and start adding parenthetical clauses to complicate them. We add ifs, buts and wherefores until we are not very clear what the mission is and are unable to tell whether we have accomplished it or not or who it benefits.

Obviously, I have exaggerated the effects of jargon for effect, but one simply has to log into the internet and surf the web in any professional domain, and see the truth of the proposition. Of course, if you are a practitioner of the jargon, the hypothesis that the jargon is incomprehensible to ordinary people is ludicrous!

I think I’d like to see blue collar simplicity gain ascendancy over the Blackberry toting intelligentsia. We need a Harry Truman not a Barack Obama. We need a Sam Walton and not a Henry Paulson. We need a pickup truck and not a BMW. We need overalls, not Brooks Brothers. We need sleep after a good day’s toil, not an all-night crawl through the bars. We need to go back to being the America of plain-speak and action.

Apparently, therein lies the simple appeal of country music and the mesmerism of the messages of Rush Limbaugh! In simplicity, and common sense, lies the strength of our enterprises! And common sense is a gift of the common man or woman.