{"product_id":"bonjour-laziness-isbn-9781400096282","title":"Bonjour Laziness","description":"\u003cb\u003eINTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “provocative ... highly readable ... refreshing ... [and] practical\" book (\u003ci\u003eThe Los Angeles Times) \u003c\/i\u003ethat explains why it is in your best interest to work as little as possible.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYour company wants you to be loyal. You should feel lucky—after all, your job is  a privilege (think of all those who would like to have it). And you know (despite  what you’ve read about Enron and WorldCom) that management has your best interests  at heart. Your goal is to devote yourself to the pursuit of corporate profit, make  your company number one, and reap the benefits of its success.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Or is there something  else you want to do with your life?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eBonjour Laziness\u003c\/i\u003e dares to ask whether you really  have a stake in the corporate sweepstakes, whether professional mobility is anything  but an opiate. It shows you how to become impervious to manipulation and escape the  implacable law of usefulness.“Provocative ... highly readable ... refreshing . . . [and] practical....  An exhilarating complaint against work.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Los Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[Maier] has become  a countercultural heroine almost overnight by encouraging ... workers to adopt  her strategy of ‘active disengagement.’” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A graceful attack  on the corporate world [and] a trenchant dissection of ‘corporate culture’ [with]  practical suggestions for subverting the workplace.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Village Voice\u003c\/i\u003eCORINNE MAIER works part-time as an economist for EDF, a French corporation. She  is also a practicing psychoanalyst and the author of nine books. She lives in France.\u003cb\u003eBusiness Speaks an Incomprehensible No-Man's-Language\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe most striking thing about the business world is its jargon. It  does not have a monopoly on this, since we live in a world of  claptrap. Universities, the media, and psychoanalysts are masters of  the genre. Still, business jargon is particularly deadly, enough to  utterly discourage the workplace hero, the Stakhanovite, lying  dormant in you. (Never mind if you don't know the meaning of  \"Stakhanovite.\" Read blithely on, for hero workers didn't make the  cut in the casting of this book. In fact, they are very rare in the  business world. There used to be some in the Soviet Union, but it's  anyone's guess what became of them.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eHello, Gibberish_\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen I first started working, I didn't understand a word my  colleagues were saying, and it took me a moment to realize that this  was normal. A superb example of this ridiculous language is found in  French novelist Michel Houellebecq's book Extension du domaine de la  lutte  (Whatever), a work that influenced a whole generation (my own):\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBefore I joined this firm, I was given a voluminous tome entitled  Development Plan for the Ministry of Agriculture's Data-Processing  System. . . . It was intended, according to the introduction, to be  an \"attempt to predefine various archetypal situations, developed in  the context of a targeted objective.\" . . . I quickly flipped through  the book, underlining the funniest sentences in pencil. For example,  \"The strategic level consists of the creation of a system of global  information promulgated through the integration of diversified,  heterogenous subsystems.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSuch is the nature of gibberish. It is the ground zero of language,  where the words no longer mean anything at all.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is because the business world has a dream: that human language,  far from being the window or mirror that certain bright intellectuals  believe it to be, can be reduced to a mere \"tool,\" a new code that is  the essence of pure information, so long as one masters the key. This  fantasy of a transparent, rational, simple-to-acquire language  translates into a true no-man's-language. Pretending to be  dispassionate and unprejudiced, and purged of all imagination, this  language envelops all statement in a cloud of scientific detachment.  Words no longer serve to convey meaning and actually obscure the  links between events by covering up the causes that produce them.  This deliberately abstruse and incomprehensible no-man's-language  ends up resembling an impenetrable jargon derived from the  pseudosciences. Its unintelligibility is perfect for seducing people  who feel more informed the more muddled their ideas are. The more  technical and abstract the language used in business, the more  persuasive businesspeople believe it to be.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIts jargon is a fixed response to the complexity of real life.  Certain mechanisms are set in motion, but they proceed in an  inexorable, wooden manner, giving the impression that no people are  actually involved. Examples: \"A watchdog unit has been established,\"  \"An information-gathering program has been instituted,\" \"A balance  sheet has been drafted.\" One might think that nothing ever happens in  business. This impersonal language, with its emphasis on processes,  gives us the illusion of being protected. Nothing can happen here: no  surprises, no excitement--unless you count being fired! This is the  peace not of the brave, but of the middle manager. History happens to  other people, the riffraff who inhabit the margins of the civilized  world and kill one another because they haven't got anything better  to do.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOnly communist regimes have churned out more jargon than modern  business. George Orwell was the first to understand that Soviet  jargon was not a jargon like any other, laughable and inoffensive,  but a genuine metamorphosis of language triggered by ideology. In  1984 he intuited the role played by newspeak in the functioning of  the totalitarian state. For business is a totalitarian power, in a  \"lite\" kind of way. It doesn't pretend that work sets you free  (Arbeit macht frei in German), although some dare to make this claim  from time to time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe real problem is that by abolishing style, jargon denies the  individual: no memo or note should ever betray its author. Each  document is polished in such a way that the ritual jargon peculiar to  each firm is respected. A collective way of writing is established.  Whatever the subject at hand, the content is squashed flat under a  steamroller. No speaker is responsible for it: he or she merely  parrots words already spoken and thus business-speak is not addressed  to anyone in particular. It's no surprise that it puts you to sleep!  It represents a unique example of a language divorced from thought  but that hasn't died as a result of this separation (yet).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBusiness-speak follows five basic rules:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt makes the simple sound complicated. It says \"initialize\"  instead of \"begin,\" which is far too ordinary; \"finalize\" instead of  the mundane \"finish\"; \"position\" for the down-to-earth \"place.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt chooses a vocabulary that makes it sound more important  than it really is. \"Coordinate\" and \"optimize\" are weightier than  \"carry out\" and \"improve.\" But \"resolve\" rules the pantheon of verbs,  beating out \"steer\" and \"supervise\" by a nose. And there's certainly  no lack of words ending in \"-ance\" or \"-ence\" and \"-ency,\" such as  \"relevance,\" \"competence,\" \"experience,\" \"efficiency,\" \"coherency,\"  \"excellence\"--words that give the appearance of importance.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBusiness-speak considers grammar a relic of the past. It  misuses circumlocution, distends syntax, mistreats words, and decks  itself out in a gaudy array of technical and managerial terms. It  corrupts language in masterly fashion: the business world loves  malapropisms. For example, when you \"decline\" a logo, a message, or a  value, you are not turning it down but merely adopting it for other  uses, featured below. Nouns are turned into verbs as in \"to access,\"  or \"to migrate\" personnel from one department to another;  intransitive verbs become transitive, as in \"growing one's business.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe language of business expresses the politics of an  impersonal power. It seeks neither to convince nor to prove, or even  to seduce, but offers obvious statements in a uniform fashion without  any value judgments. The goal? To make you obey. Beware: Joseph  Goebbels, Hitler's right-hand man, once said, \"We don't speak to  communicate anything but to create a certain effect.\" And in fact,  business newspeak is halfway between self-proclaimed scientific  objectivity and the peremptory stridency of the slogan. Thus we get:  \"Interdepartmental cooperation must be optimized.\" \"It is imperative  that the new modus operandi be achieved by the deadline of the  fifteenth.\" Or: \"Implementing the orientations defined by the project  are and will remain a priority.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBusiness-speak takes only the most well-traveled roads, where  every twist and turn is familiar. Even if a text or memo says  nothing, it can still be decoded: it reveals its meaning whenever it  diverges from the secret code. Every deviation from the expected  reveals something. So if you have nothing better to do, you can  become an expert in jargon. . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis language has a hold over us and claims to speak for us, reducing  the employee to a simple piece of machinery. Get up, machine, and get  to work! Your perceptions, your feelings, your ambition, must be  translatable into spreadsheets and graphs, and your labor is but a  \"process\" that must be rationalized.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCorrupting language is a costly affair. Our words seem to have been  doctored. When it becomes difficult to disentangle truth and lies and  to quash rumors, mistrust reigns. Not surprisingly, employees become  paranoid that a vast plot is being hatched against them by top  management. It's true: the bosses speak a language worthy of Pravda,  the Soviet organ of official truth. But does this really mean they're  up to no good? Sometimes it does, but sometimes there is a more  innocent explanation: executives speak newspeak because they've been  trained to, and they are chosen for certain positions of power on the  basis of their mastery of this lingua franca. Jargonism is in their  blood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA training course in \"native language\" would be helpful in a number  of our executive suites, but this is rarely on the syllabus of the  executive MBA. They prefer neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and  similarly half-baked approaches, whose primary objective is to keep  everyone thinking and speaking in circles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eAcronyms: A Thicket, a Wilderness, Nay, a Veritable Labyrinth\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf the newspeak of the business world is particularly repulsive, it  is also because everybody speaks in abbreviations. While jargon has  eliminated a certain number of words, it has also created a large  number of them--especially those based on abbreviations and  contractions--without a thought for how awful they sound. The names  of units, groups, and departments are always acronyms. This is the  sort of thing one hears at a meeting: \"AGIR has become IPN, which  supervises the STI, divesting the SSII of control of the DM, but the  latter will waste no time in subsuming RTI.\" One hour of this sort of  talk in the cafeteria is enough to drive you batty. The objective is  to make those who know what the acronyms mean think that they belong  to the privileged few, an inner circle who really knows what's what.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere's no point, however, in memorizing the meaning of these cryptic  acronyms. They're changing all the time, in accordance with the  successive restructurings aimed at reshuffling the cards without ever  changing the deck--anything but! What this proliferation of  abbreviations shows is that over the course of the many  reorganizations and mergers\/acquisitions, businesses become so  complex and labyrinthine that you don't know whether you are coming  or going. As a result, competition intensifies, responsibilities  overlap, Russian dolls multiply. A progressive financial daily*  summed up the phenomenon as follows: \"We belong to the era of  multiple cross-world ownership.\" Translation in plain talk: \"The  organization is a shambles.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere is a golden rule in the process of naming teams: each unit is  named in such a way as to imply that its importance is vital to the  firm, without being too explicit about what it actually does for fear  of creating too much work. Most acronyms are formed with the same  words, which include the following: \"information,\" \"technology,\"  \"support,\" \"management,\" \"development,\" \"application,\" \"data,\"  \"service,\" \"direction,\" \"center,\" \"computer,\" \"network,\" \"research,\"  \"raccoon,\" \"market,\" \"product,\" \"marketing,\" \"consumer,\" and  \"client.\" You have one minute to find the one that doesn't belong in  this list. . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eForeign Languages: No Pasaran\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNevertheless, even though it's hard for them, the French have to  admit that the Americans are the masters of capitalism. Harvard is  the Bethlehem of money. So you have to listen to what Uncle Sam has  to say on the matter. The business schools of Western Europe suffer  from an inferiority complex vis-a-vis their American models. No  sooner does a word become all the rage in the United States than it  crosses the Atlantic like a wave and engulfs our management schools,  our commercial institutions, and our businessmen's speech. Linguistic  inaccuracies are irrelevant; it's enough to sprinkle these buzzwords  over the transparencies and \"charts.\" That's the basic idea.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere is a sample of contemporary business French; the italicized  words are in English in the original: \"I'm doing the follow-up on a  merging project with a coach; I'm checking the downsizing.\" This  means you're firing people. Similarly, \"reengineering\" has taken the  place of \"reorganizing.\" And when the French terms have so negative a  connotation that they become unusable, English is used as a practical  cosmetic measure: in the hush-hush environment of the firm, one must  remain positive even when everything is going wrong. You've been  fired? Smile and say \"cheese\"!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis relationship of fascination\/repulsion with regard to the United  States explains why no one in France really speaks the language of  these barbarians. It's a known fact that the French are not very good  at immersing themselves in the fine points of English. And we're not  talking here about the language of Shakespeare, a difficult author  writing in an archaic style, but rather of Michael Jackson, a singer  who has more shades of white and gray in his makeup drawer than he  has words in his vocabulary.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrench executives, who are supposed to be able to communicate with  the whole world within the framework of flexible, cosmopolitan  networks, are irremediably bad in languages. Is it because of their  chauvinistic resistance to globalization? Could they possibly believe  that the business world of the future will speak French, which for  them (and them alone) is the most precise and beautiful language in  the world? To speak a no-man's-language in the workplace is already  enough of a chore; no point in making it more complicated by learning  English. . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003ePlatitudes Aplenty\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe rash of platitudes and commonplaces bandied about in the business  world, which can't get enough of them, is flabbergasting.  Conventional turns of phrase and old chestnuts abound. In fact, only  the most conventional and hackneyed expressions find their way into  the comforting, cliche-ridden world of the office; the jokey \"Damn  the torpedoes,\" so yesterday, and the enigmatic and disturbing \"What  goes around comes around\" are scarcely worth mentioning. But the  point, of course, is to \"dumb things down,\" as they say at the office.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe newcomer to the business world is perplexed until he understands  that the impersonal appearance of this half-baked wisdom hides  nothing more than the interests and ambitions of the person voicing  them. In the treasury of commonly used proverbs and expressions, the  following are particular favorites (with the translation in  parentheses):\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"There are no problems, there are only solutions\" (an absurd  sentence, greatly appreciated by engineers justifying their  existence).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Knowledge is power\" (which means: \"I know more than you\").\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Work less but work smarter\" (slogan used by the most hypocritical  bosses to make you get to work).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"It's all a matter of organization\" (same meaning as above).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"You have to prioritize\" (\"It's out of the question for me to work harder\").\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The sky's the limit\" (\"I can't stand it anymore\").\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Where there's smoke there's fire\" (\"I smell a rat\").\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Let's not beat around the bush\" (\"I'm going to be frank: no more hypocrisy\").\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTaking notes in meetings is never futile for the lover of empty  phrases and nonsense. And then, every so often (anything can happen),  the great, generous womb of language yields up a pearl, an unexpected  or pleasant turn of phrase, which makes up for all those afternoons  spent listening to garbage.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299865514213,"sku":"NP9781400096282","price":12.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400096282.jpg?v=1767722928","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/bonjour-laziness-isbn-9781400096282","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}