Contemplation of management jargon triggers an exciting idea for ‘Architects of Change’ everywhere

WHO TALKS more management nonsense, men or women? I thought I knew the answer to this most intriguing of questions: the man beats the woman every time.

This is partly because men are fonder of the sporting metaphor, and like to step up to the plate whilst raising the bar on their bench strength in the level playing field.

But it’s also because the point of jargon is either to make you sound big or as a substitute for thought, and women are less keen on sounding big, and less inclined to speak before they have worked out what, if anything, they have to say.

However, several things have happened to me recently to make me doubt the superiority of men at talking guff. The first was a lunch I attended for top women in business. As these women held forth, there was an orgy of “reaching out” and “delivering value” and “going forward” that would have made any man feel quite at home.

The next day I received the programme for the biggest women’s jamboree the world has ever seen. This week, 30,000 women will gather in Long Beach and another million will follow online an event organised by Maria Shriver, the first lady of California, at which Michelle Obama, Meg Whitman and Billie Jean King will each say their bit.

The promotional video for the event shows Ms Shriver talking a blue streak of drivel.

“Being who we are is in fact the greatest gift that we can give ourselves, our community and our world,” she says.

Is being who I am a gift? Or is it a tautology?

If it is the best gift I can give, then that’s a shame for myself, our community and our world, as we all surely deserve better.

The point of the conference is to empower, educate and inspire women to be “Architects of Change®”. But it’s not quite clear to me why anyone would want to be such a thing. An architect is someone who designs a building and then invariably falls out with the builders who build it and the clients who pay for it. And if I wanted to be an architect, the last thing I’d want to architect (the noun now perfectly acceptable as a verb in management circles) would be change, in general.

Good change is good, bad change is bad, and sometimes the status quo is the best of all.

You might think I’m being a bit on the mean side. After all, this is California, and this programme is aimed at all women, not just bright ones. Indeed one of the “breakout conversations” is entitled: “Are you comfortable in a bathing suit?”

There is no such excuse for the Women on Wall Street who are also having their annual knees-up this week.

The Wows invitation begins: “What stands between you and your next big breakthrough?”

I know the answer to this already: laziness and other people.

“How do your perspectives influence whether or not you can turn that innovative idea into an actionable initiative?” it goes on.

Leaving perspectives to one side, I don’t see why anyone would want to make an idea into an actionable initiative in the first place. The only good idea on Wall Street is to make money, and there are no pat answers as to how one does that.

What all this tells us is not that all women talk drivel, but that everyone talks drivel when they start thinking about women as a general topic.

Indeed now even saying the word “women” is too blunt for some. A reader who has just returned from an Akzo Nobel meeting tells me that to promote board diversity the company is looking for candidates with a “female background”.

This is a most interesting development. Are they looking for transgender directors to sit on the board? Or people who were brought up in households where women predominated?

The very second that I was pondering this, an e-mail landed from the Association for Psychological Science with the subject line: “Too many sisters affect male sexuality”.

It said that various experiments had been most rigorously conducted on rats, the upshot of which was that rats brought up with lots of sisters spent less time mounting other rats than those brought up with males.

So here is my actionable initiative that will make me an Architect of Change®. Selection committees should find out how many sisters a man has before giving him a job.

Too many sisters may not teach a man how to talk properly, but they do teach him how to behave. – Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2009