« ROI and The Rush Job | Main | I.T. Without ITIL »

January 26, 2007

Disruptive Innovation in the Garden of Good and Evil

21st century cultural inflections have a funny way of surfacing through business. On the way to Enron, white-collar crime ("Success means never having to say you got caught") eclipsed bit-headedness to sprout the dreaded Y2K. And at this point, in the breadbasket of the world, more people in America work at Starbucks than on farms. In the wake of these shifts, almost completely overlooked has been what may prove to be the biggest inflection point of all -- the ascendancy of jibber jabber over mumbo jumo.

For more than a century, mumbo jumbo has been a staple of corporate and political thinking, establishing some of the key beachheads on which blockheads could land en masse to seize the day. The old school combined jumbo and mumbo with power, relying on confidence in wrapping things that don't really go together with things that only briefly make sense, and forcefully delivering them. Most prominent in election campaigns and I.T. vendor marketing, mumbo jumbo remains a headliner; but the polls show that fewer and fewer people buy it each year.

In its place, the new dynamic of jibber jabber relies on something other than power to create the liberating stupidity navigated by ersatz leaders. The effective combination of jabber and jibber relies on persistence, not power, to numb its audience into cooperation -- by bundling an indifferently unwavering delivery of a party line, any party line, to a captive audience.

For the purveyor, jibber jabber ultimately craves the strategic advantage of being the only game in town, which can make it pretty mean sometimes; and yet, the polls show that public tolerance for this meanness has never been greater -- except of course regarding broadcast network television programming. Viewers routinely say "Up Yours!" to the programmers, and they've come to enjoy saying it.

Ironically, for the victim, er...consumer, of jibber jabber, a nostalgia for simplicity might be the key to its rise: the relief of having only three channels, in black and white, instead of 600 in color. Or of having parents who will use "because I said so". No wonder jibber jabber is so important in the commodity market for consulting, where the invoice is increasingly about having a decision on time when anxiety is too high about not having the time to decide. That is, there is an actual need for jibber jabber, akin to over-the-counter self-medication for insecurity.

Otherwise, reflecting on your own experience, you'll observe that jibber jabber is most often seemingly free, and it often becomes annoying only when you suddenly realize that you don't have to listen to it, and you change the channel or end the date. Thanks to telemarketing, we can learn from experience to actively shun jibber jabber -- both by blocking it and hanging up; but it doesn't really bother us that we know it will just show up somewhere else.

Finally though, having the trickery of mumbo jumbo's chutzpah lose out to the neurotic frontin' of jibber jabber's dogma is both disturbing and fun -- the aesthetic of horror movies and recreational psychotherapy... It's not really clear why we'd want things this way. But objectively noting the change as a sign of the times, there it is.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at January 26, 2007 3:27 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.malcolmryder.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/309

Comments

Post a comment