|
Corporate platitudes for dummies >> Learn how to enjoy being laid off for only $32.95 by PHILIP PREVILLE
A Toronto-based corporate strategy consultant, 38-year-old Jim Harris makes his living by studying what businesses do, looking for harbingers, predicting the future and telling corporations what to do about it. Lately, he's noticed that the economy is "changing." People are doing business on the Internet, for example. Salsa now outsells ketchup. Large corporations have been laying people off by the tens of thousands. Jim Harris pulls all of these disparate facts together into a single, seamless theory of everything. And this time, rather than sell his brainchild to corporations, he's willing to sell it to anybody, even you. For your own benefit, to help you cope. His neatly packaged explanation of the world can be found in his book The Learning Paradox: Gaining Success and Security in a World of Change (Macmillan Canada, $32.95). His theory in a nutshell: "The world is changing." So Harris told the Mirror. Let's call it capital-C Change. What should people do about Change? "The ability to learn and to accept uncertainty," Harris explains, "is what creates job security. "Think about it: stability lies in Change. It's a beautiful paradox." Huh? Back in 1988, Brian Mulroney tried to sell Canadians on the free-trade agreement by saying that he was the best person to "manage Change," and we all know what the free trade Change did to the economy. These days, the word Change is creeping into everything from employee newsletters to political flyers to news reports, a purposefully vague explanation of why there are no more jobs or why the health system is falling apart. And while Jim Harris is not entirely responsible for the widespread use of this insipid word, he is one of its biggest cheerleaders. Okay then, Mister Harris: who's in charge of Change? "No one. That's like asking, 'Who's in charge of nature?'" Ah. So those tens of thousands of layoffs at Bell Canada and CN and the government and IBM, they just happened? Like Hurricane Mitch? "Let me give you an analogy," Harris says, backtracking. "Change is like a baby growing up: parents have to alter their relationship to their child over time. Take Motorola, for example. They make the best analog cell phones in the world, but people want digital phones now. Motorola has lost its market leadership." So Motorola killed the baby? "No, no. We are the baby. The consumer is the baby. We want different things, and Motorola hasn't kept up with us." So Motorola failed to spoil the baby and Motorola is killing itself as a result. And because they weren't on the ball, because someone at Motorola screwed up, they're going to lay off thousands of people. And those people should just accept it. Right? "I don't want to sell Change as positive," Jim Harris replies. "It's incredibly painful for people because there's a dislocation process. There will be pain as we let go of the old way of doing things. I'm not trying to soft-sell this." Don't shoot the Messenger of Change, he pleads. "I'm saying, 'Discover the capacity within yourself to learn and to Change, and then, as Joseph Campbell says, follow your bliss.' Learn how to learn." So in other words, Change is out there, and Change more often than not means things like job losses, longer workweeks and human obsolescence, and there's not much people can do about it. For most people, Change means they are going to have to eat shit. The problem with Jim Harris and messengers of his ilk is that they want to help you learn to like it. Memo to Jim Harris: Bang.
|
Jim Harris has got the whole world figured out.