Diary

27 June 2009

Quentin Wilson's diary

It used to really bother me. Sitting in what I thought was the presence of greatness, I’d leave hugely underwhelmed. Top people in top jobs who seemed to be rubbish. I even used to tell myself off. Intellectual snobbery, I self-scolded, is a smug character flaw. But the sneaking suspicion that lots of important people were actually really useless wouldn’t go away. I internalised my doubts until they squelched. For years I listened patiently to their patent nonsense. Heads of car companies, television commissioners, private sector chief executives, council bosses and entire government departments all seemed to speak in a language strangely detached from meaning. So many acronyms and abbreviations, so many clumsy invented words, so much tosh and flannel signifying nothing. Why did they all talk such blue-sky tripe?

But age and experience (not to mention the unfolding of recent national and global events) have confirmed what I always secretly knew. There are too many shysters in jobs they can’t do. Here’s a dirigible-sized truism: much of our current economic malaise is directly due to the bad decisions made by these muppets. Risks that shouldn’t have been taken, money that should never have been lent, assets that were deliberately overvalued and company accounts that sailed close to fraud. We’ve had a decade of seedy mediocrities who have clambered high up the career rope-ladder using CVs stiff with lies, deceit and astonishing amounts of arrogant self-belief. Crap people with crap ideas.

And they’re still here. They’re not going away, they’re not being made accountable and they’re still wasting our time with their nonsense. The downturn, it seems, has taught us nothing. This week I sat open-mouthed as the head of a big car parts supplier told me that his company was using resource backfilling as a framing solution to their resource contention issue. Insanity at an executive level. His firm was in the sherbet dip. Why couldn’t he just say, like everyone else in the car industry, that sales are on the floor and he’s having a tough time extending the overdraft? He couldn’t, because he wanted to have me over. I don’t know which was worse. The wilful obfuscation, the murder of the English language or the fact he thought I was as stupid as he was.

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