Last week I made a note to look up “The Decoy of Lying,” by Oscar Wilde. No more information than that. Today, confused, I Google the phrase and get two hits — both links to a website devoted to bluebirds. Actual bluebirds. Say what? It’s humbling, being outwitted by your own notebook like this.
The following words are “sure to make the reader dig in his heels and resist,” according to Martha Luck’s 1972 Instant Secretary’s Handbook:
childish
useless
impossible
blame
extravagant
failure
so-called
cheap
premature
fault
reject
biased
careless
superficial
allege
alibi
They should be avoided in all written correspondence, she continued. I’m trying to imagine why “childish” heads the list, but perhaps business letters from the 1970s were more interesting than today’s.
Peter Drucker has been jipped, reputation-wise. He’s exalted in management circles, but most other thinking people don’t pay him much mind. (Because, as the thinking goes, anything from that part of the bookstore reeks of imaginative failure.) Drucker wrote for decades; his “The Concept of the Corporation” was first published in 1946, and he kept on writing into his nineties until his death in 2005 finally put an end to it. Reading his work, which is most fundamentally an examination of human behavior under the influence of the group, and particularly about the mores of people that came to be known as “knowledge workers,” can be bracing. He had an ability to slice through a lot of the political and motivational inanities that dot, nay, blanket the American landscape.
Tip #2: Read “The Concept of the Corporation.” In the revised 1960 edition, for instance, he dissected the cultural emphasis on “getting ahead.” Getting ahead had come to be seen as the exclusive criterion for success — a historical anomaly, he pointed out — and so we turned a blind eye to the bedrock, scientific fact that “inevitably only a minority can advance.” When people started fretting about shrinking opportunities for advancement, he felt they were being a bit (albeit unconsciously) disingenuous. What they were dealing with was an economy that now offered fewer and fewer “opportunities for self-fulfillment except in advancement.” [emphasis mine]
What does Drucker suggest people who aren’t interested in getting ahead do with themselves? Garden? Join a monastary? Seems to me he posits that one do anything other than sign on to work in a white-collar corporate setting. Drop out or don’t drop out, just don’t kid yourself. Because if you’re not willing to endure the pecking order, the collective neuroses, and not ambitious (or angry) enough to lie awake at night imagining innovative ways to rise up through them, you will…suffer. In every conceivable way. I like how a lot of the smarter business books are actually dis-inspirational in this way. (I hadn’t expected that to be the case.)
Then there’s this nugget, from his unfortunately titled “Managing Oneself,” which appeared in the Harvard Business Review in 1999:
“Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong.”
Tip #1: Don’t release photos of yourself looking like a) a choir teacher, or b) a 5 o’clock news anchor, if you’re trying to suggest to your audience that you’re someone they might care to know. Just a thought upon receiving the advance reading copies of How to Be Useful. (Has my hair ever looked that coiffed? It has not.) Other than that, they look beautiful.