The Evils of Corporate-Speak, Redux

Since the beginning of August, I've been taking home delivery of the Sunday New York Times (which doesn't actually get delivered until Monday morning, but there you are). I fear I may end up mired in newsprint - as one usually requires a handcart to move the Sunday edition round the house - so I got a three-month subscription to start. Anyway. While living in Europe, my Sundays were always devoted to large breakfasts, capuccino in abundance, and the papers, so it's good to re-establish this particular routine (which had sadly lapsed since I moved back to Canada).

And this Sunday, a great essay in the Book Review by the great Barbara Ehrenreich. Her subject? The superabundance of 'business success' books to be found in airport bookstores everywhere. I've never understood them. Reassuringly, neither does Ehrenreich, and she has a mind like a steel trap. "If you find [these books] immoral, delusional or insulting to the human spirit," she writes,

you should humbly consider the fact that, to judge from the blurbs on the backs of these books, they have won the endorsement of numerous actual C.E.O.'s [sic] of prominent companies. Maybe the books tell us what these fellows want their underlings to believe. ... Or -- and this is the truly scary possibility -- maybe the principles embody what the C.E.O.'s [sic] themselves believe, and it is in fact the delusional, the immoral and the verbally challenged who are running the show.