In a manner of speaking

We don’t cross our T’s and dot our I’s these days. Those were the days when we went in for prim and proper English, which alone was a passport to riches. We had a certain descendant of the British bureaucracy (of native stock, of course) whose decisions as a general manager depended upon the “quality” of the notes put up to him .By quality we did not mean the logical or technical homework behind the notes but, essentially the purity of the language used, more particularly of the grammar and the syntax . A whole lot of performance appraisals took place on the basis of how good the English was. A man joins the organization at a young age, properly backed by Wren and Martin and the Fowler and works his way up in the hierarchical levels through sheer verbal and written skills in the alien language. Promotions naturally depended upon proficiency in the language.

While the insistence on the purity of the language has considerably waned over the years the fascination for the language has remained. One would hear young mothers in Delhi airport speaking to their toddlers in English when they had not even learnt to speak. We don’t want to be missing out on the competitive edge that proficiency in the language supposedly confers in the rat-race. The divide is clear –between the urban, suave “convent”-educated English speaker and the “native”, Municipal-school-educated speaker who’s heavily accented English invites scorn in all public places .The Hindi flicks are full of stories of the native speaker of English which are found hilarious by the crowds.

Our way of speaking has gone a long way. So has our business communication. We now speak some esoteric words to describe the most commonplace thing. It is not embellishment. It is not even techie stuff. It is just that our Harvard alumni, aided by our own B-school glitterati have spawned a new phraseology for describing the most common things. Jargon is good business in today’s corporate world. The consultants are there to provide most of it. A traditional businessman would take a look at his falling business figures and attempt to change his business style or improve methods of production. Our consultants would sit with the new business managers and seriously hold closed-door conferences doing what they call “re-engineering”. The beauty of the so-called re-engineering is to get the in-house team of the organization to do all the work while our consultants watch them poring through the “processes”! The H.R pundits are engaged by organizations to do what they call “effectiveness” counseling which in fact means they 'effectively' collect the moolah while the in-house candidates sweat it out doing mock exercises.

The personnel consultants are now engaged even to conduct what they call the “assessment centre” procedures for executive selections. The consultants, professing uncanny skills in spotting executives, depend for their assessments solely on their observation of the candidates through an interaction lasting one-two days. They make these hapless guys go through the most ridiculous exercises on the basis of which they jump to outrageous conclusions bearing on the determination of the competency levels of these senior personnel! They do what they call “mapping “of the competencies through a competency matrix or whatever they call it.

In the traditional performance appraisals we talk about leadership qualities and are fairly clear as to what we mean by them because we have seen them in action. In the assessment centre procedures the tools used by these pundits are supposed to be so precise that based upon their observation of how an individual behaves in group interactions they are able to come to well-rounded conclusions about the competency levels! No one knows how anyone can relate these simulated conditions to the back-home situations! The conclusions reached are so hilarious that people within the organization talk about them for months on end citing examples of how people who are known for their inept way of handling the operations situations are rated as possessing those sterling qualities of leadership!