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Out of that mood swing, I concocted the following fantasy, to make fun of how fast things change in technology, and how quickly we all jump on the bandwagon.
It began at a war council of Microsoft competitors, searching for a chink in Microsoft's armor. What if they could convince the world that big products like MS Word and Excel were dinosaurs, too big and too expensive to be useful?
One executive got especially carried away. "Who has time to learn all the bells and whistles of the top word processing programs or graphics packages," he said at an industry meeting. "These programs are a waste every which way -- the cost of buying them, the cost of hiring and training people to run them, the cost of upgrading every year." And besides, he said, "Everyone knows the best communication is a plain handwritten memo. We should toss all this complicated stuff and start over again from scratch."
The remark got broad play, first on the Internet news services, then fanning out to industry media. People at Microsoft pooh-poohed the trend. "This 'new primitivism' is a good way to let out our frustration, but it's no substitute for products tested and improved over many years in the field by the top professionals in the industry."
But then the idea spread outside the industry. Advertising people picked up on it. Human resource professionals. Worst of all, it caught the eye of management consultants, always on the lookout for a new angle. The defining moment occurred when the chairman of a Fortune 500 financial services company stepped in front of a hostile annual meeting, grease pencil in hand, and on the spot improvised a series of effective transparencies showing why the company had write-offs of over $848 million in the two quarters, and why that was a good, and not a bad, thing.
The shareholders, expecting the usual shaded screens and back-lit fonts, watched the bravura performance open-mouthed. You could have heard a pin drop. But no sooner had that chairman whipped out his pen to call attention away from the form and onto the content, than that form became the content. It was perverse, but there it was.
Soon everyone was doing it. Pen and paper became to the late 1990s what suspenders were to the early 1980s, and rolled shirtsleeves to the '70s. Multimillion-dollar proposals were presented on cocktail napkins. Consultants making $30,000 per day were walking up the aisles of amphitheaters creating their own cue cards on the fly.
The new primitivism swept the business world like no fad since clear cola. Managers pinned hand-made drawings of key benchmarks on tape-scarred bulletin boards. Vice President Gore was photographed holding up a federal org chart jotted on the back of a Taco Bell placemat.
TV commercials made vigorous use of the images of hard-nosed managers banging out corporate goals and objectives on blackboards and pinning handwritten exhortations on office corkboards.
Slogans included: lean talk ... no frills leadership ... and just say it.
The new style reached its apex when Ross Perot appeared before a select congressional subcommittee on import restrictions with his entire testimony outlined on the back of a folded-up (and canceled) #10 envelope.
From there things went downhill. Software companies, reeling from the fad, countered with programs that recreated the primitive look. CA unveiled Dash It All!, a presentation package that took hours to use but looked like it was jotted down on a brown paper washroom towel. Corel struck gold with Illegible, a program that converted a CEO's hurried dry-marker handwriting into a scaleable font. Even Microsoft, which was not supposed to benefit from this upheaval, chimed in with MS Cinch, offering 40 primitive templates on which to mount elaborate but seemingly spontaneous notes -- including coffee rings, cigarette burns, and lipstick stains.
The look was the same; only the processes had changed. It looked easy and off-the-cuff and vibrant, which, come to think of it, had been the appeal of the fad all along. It certainly wasn't the ideas the primeval-wannabes expressed.
The new apps had advantages people had forgotten how much they liked. You could save and re-use documents, do team edits, use elements in one document as the building blocks for several others. And people could read them. Best of all, it took skill and training to master the programs, and that enhanced job security, and that allowed the trembling masses in personnel management to calm their chattering teeth.
Managers were relieved to discover they could farm their thinking back to their staff. Departments hired back the workers they had let go a few short months before. In allt he commotion no one ever noticed the emperor was naked, that business change is driven by boredom. And we all went back to communicating as usual.
The fable you have just read is, repeat, just that, a story. It sprang from the imagination of Michael Finley, co-author of Why Change Doesn't Work. The products cited do not exist. Visit Mike at www.mfinley.com, or write him at mfinley@mfinley.com.
To contact Mike Finley ...
mfinley@mfinley.com
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