Orchard Hardware Supply used that phrase for a springtime commercial. They were spoofing all of the current buzz words used to describe how our businesses are so open and honest, etc....or are they? The more we hear these words, the more I think we have to question what it is organizations really do or how they are doing it. Jargon and double speak are cheap these days, but honesty seems to come at a premium.
Organizations profess to have "core values"; they create mission statements informing people what they think they are supposed to be doing. They talk about win-win solutions; getting down to the granular level, getting away from silos, etc. But my favorite is the word transparency. Everything is about transparency today -- but when you try and pin someone down about numbers or business practices, or why someone is not getting their paycheck on time -- there are excuses -- without any real answers or transparency. And now we know the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been systematically destroying records for the last 17 years -- how's that for transparency? What is it that they did not want anyone to find?
It seems to me, the more organizations talk about all of these things, the less they actually live by these words -- they "doth protest too much, methinks." While we have never had a perfect world or society, we could at least trust some of the information that was provided to us. And now with the information highway, nearly everything can be verified, but yet leaders lie and mislead us daily. When we did not use jargon and double speak, we actually did real work, with real outcomes, and relied on real numbers to balance our budgets and produce profit and loss statements. Most institutions and companies had integrity and ethics.
As a case in point, the misspeak was so bad at Monday night's Republican debate, that Dana Milbank of the Washington Post Writer Group stated that a candidate when pushed "resorted to the time honored tradition of making up stuff". He further stated that the same candidate when nailed by another candidate, "licked his lips...looked at the ceiling...and blinked so rapidly his eyes could have been sending a coded S.O.S. signal".
That's funny, but this is not funny stuff. Our state institutions and country are in trouble -- which means that all of us are in trouble. We need to be told the truth -- by someone. We need to bring honesty and integrity back to our government and our corporations. We need to pay attention to the lies and doublespeak -- our future is too important to be left to those of both political parties that constantly lie, all the while doing something else entirely behind the scenes.
It is time to demand honesty and integrity from our leaders and get our institutions functioning effectively again. I think we did create win-win solutions long before those buzz words were used. We lived by them every day. As Orchard Hardware Supply said at the end of their commercial, "We've been using best practices since 1931." Enough said.
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