Knowledge Work

How? Talk technical-sounding rubbish. If it works for new-age airheads spouting ignorant garbage about quantum physics, it can work for you, too:

I’ve been to quite a few consultancy presentations where all kinds of jargon and graphs are flashed up on the screen. The consultants will drop terms like “inverted blade-center uptime matrix” into the presentation while showing some baffling data on the screen. If I look around the room while this is going on, everyone will be nodding and wide-eyed. The audience is baffled by the cool-sounding words and the clever-looking graphs.

If, at this time, you ask the consultant what exactly an “inverted blade-center uptime matrix” is, they’ll often try to fob-you off with even more meaningless jargon. If you persist in trying to pin them down, they’ll start acting like you must be some kind of incompetent idiot for not understanding this stuff. And the audience will probably be on the consultant’s side - they don’t want to be seen as incompetent idiots.

Consultants behave this way because they know that’s how to get a sale. Bombard people with clever-sounding stuff they don’t really understand, and they’ll assume that you’re some kind of genius. It’s a great way of making money.

Stock analysts, economic forecasters, management consultants, futurologists, investment advisors and so on use this tactic all the time. It’s their chief marketing strategy for the simple reason that it works.

Just make a far-fetched claim - like you know where the stock-market will be this time next year - and dress it up in some fancy language, graphs, and figures. All sorts of otherwise intelligent people will virtually beg you to take their money.

Enron built an entire global company using this scheme. Often, during the late-90s press coverage about how wonderful Enron was, the writer would admit no-one knew quite how the company was making its money. They were quick to assure their readers that this was nothing to be alarmed about, however. This was the most admired company in the world, after all. Just listen to all that fancy energy-market jargon that the managers spout.

It sounded clever, so it must be true.

Only it wasn’t.

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