For years, one of the huge problems with Boeing was that it was run by people who knew how to build planes. While this "engineering-first" approach produced excellent planes that didn't fall out of the sky, it lacked the soft-skills that professional managers bring to an organisation. Then, about 30 years ago, things started to change. Boeing replaced its management, swapping out old-style engineer managers with MBA-graduate managers who know how to write convincing PowerPoint decks with nifty values statements and purpose statements and mission statements. For a while, it seemed like a genius move. The catch? Boeing's planes started to fall out of the sky. This is the story of how one company decided to embrace the wisdom of management theory, and in doing so became the ultimate case-study in management theory.

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In 2008 General Motors circulated an internal presentation listing 69 words that employees were banned from using.

It’s not the typical sort of list that you might see in a company’s brand voice guidelines or corporate communications playbook. This thing reads like the glossary for a horror novel.

Graphic words like ‘apocalyptic’, ‘mangling’, ‘grenadlike’ and ‘disembowling’ make the list. So too ‘Hindenberg’ and – bizzarly – ‘Cobain’. But seemingly benign words like ‘safety’ and ‘critical’ are off limits too.

In this episode James and Charles explain why the list was circulated in the first place, and try to make sense of the words on it. They also have a broader discussion about how companies use language as a form of control, and attempt to describe one of the worst examples of graphic design on a PowerPoint presentation ever seen.

View the PowerPoint slide from hell here: https://wankernomics.com/shownotes

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Full tour schedule: Wankernomics.com/live

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At Wankernomics, we love corporate values – the four or five words that are chosen at an off-site meeting run by an overpaid facilitator, placed on a poster in the office kitchen and then never spoken about again.

In this episode, James and Charles unpack the organisational values of social media giant Meta. Do Meta’s values match with reality? Were they written by a toddler? And what on earth does the word Metamate even mean?

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Full tour schedule: Wankernomics.com/live

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.