Thursday, August 18, 2005

I heart Lucy Kellaway

Sometime ago, I used to subscribe to the Financial Times. There were three reasons for this:

  1. I could avail of a student discount which, at 44 cents a day, made the FT cheaper than the Straits Times. (And with 10 times as much content as the ST.)
  2. Reading the FT made me feel important and accomplished. (Though I quickly realised that, at $4 per day, the real price of the FT after my student discount ended outweighed my self-esteem.)
  3. It had some seriously delightful (and some delightfully serious) articles and supplements: How to Spend It, Martin Lukes and Lucy Kellaway.

Now that I'm no longer a student, I've stopped receiving the FT. And I miss it. I miss reading about yachts that cost a million pounds, and diamonds baubles that cost half as much, and flimsy women's clothing that cost hundreds of pounds (if not thousands), and I miss laughing at them.

But most of all I miss Lucy Kellaway. For those not in the know, Lucy Kellaway is the FT’s management columnist. I've followed her weekly Monday column as it poked fun at management fads and jargon and celebrated the ups and downs of office life. Consider her take on the recent fad of 'corporate story-telling':

"When I first came across the corporate storytelling craze about six or seven years ago, I thought it was a joke. (Which, on second thoughts, doesn't set it apart from other management trends. I also suspected knowledge management was a joke, and total quality management, too. I'm sure I would also have thought six sigma funny if I had ever had the first idea of what it actually was.)"


I missed reading Lucy, and her columns on the FT online are subscription-protected (boo!). I missed her so much, that this week I called the FT and enquired about subcription rates. $550 per year meant the rates had come down to about $2 per day, but I was still reluctant to spend so much money so fast.

So I set about searching for any of her articles that may have made it into the non-protected online wilderness. So I Googled "Lucy Kellaway" column and was greeted by a surprisingly large number of articles republished (and in some cases, rebutted) elsewhere.

Encouraged I had another brainwave. Realising that my company has a corporate subscription to Lexis Nexis, I searched that database for articles by Lucy K. And I am happy to announce that I now have a file that contains all of Lucy's articles in 2005. That should keep me occupied for the next few days. After that I'll download some more and be occupied for a few more weeks.

But eventually I'll probably give in and get the newspaper after all. There's a certain charm to opening a fresh paper in the morning, folding it to page 9, and reading it on the morning bus to work. I may even read something useful that way.

I'll leave you with another snippet from May this year with reference to a column in the Harvard Business Review bemoaning the dumbing down of management.

"This article complains that employees are being treated like infants and it is time to treat them like grown-ups.

My analysis of what has gone wrong with management is just the reverse. There has been a mighty dumbing up of management and management thought in recent years. The simple and impressionistic is made into the complex and scientific. It has resulted in the most elaborate time-wasting nonsense. And to the extent to which employees are being treated like children, I can't see anything wrong with that. In my experience, children have very little patience with doing anything at all unless they can see a clear purpose."

And finally her hilarious deconstruction of Accenture's 2002 Annual Report. On the word 'Deliver':

This verb is straight in at number one. If you think "delivery" is something that involves a truck, and which Ikea charges for, you are sadly out of date. Accenture delivers all manner of things, none of which requires a truck or even a bicycle. "Innovation Delivered," it says on the cover, which sounds splendid and is ambiguous enough to be unchallengeable.

Inside, there are five D-words in one short paragraph. Under the heading "Global Strategic Delivery Approach," we learn that "the ultimate goal is to deliver price competitive solutions." This is done through "a global network of delivery centres," which "enhance the ability to deliver results." This sounds a bit circular—but maybe that's the point.

There are also more advanced grammatical forms—deliverables, and delivering on something. The grocery van delivers on Tuesday; Accenture "delivers on great ideas."