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Economy

When Your Boss Sounds Like Churchill — Or Worse, Elon Musk

If a CEO starts quoting Churchill or some Silicon Valley titan to give pomp to their office speeches, they’re only highlighting their utter lack of originality and leadership.

That Musk approach
That Musk approach
Nicolas Santolaria

-Essay-

PARIS — "Success," Winston Churchill is often quoted as saying, "consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."

Despite its many burdens, being a CEO does have its perks — the most enjoyable of which may be the license to throw bombastic truisms around, with the pomposity of a North Korean dictator. Generally, a lack of vision is proportional to the boss's tendency to conjure up great men, in an effort to shine a light on what they mean and do.

If your new boss, upon taking office, starts his or her speech by quoting French poet René Char's famous "Push your luck, cling to your happiness and go toward your risk. After a while, they will get used to it" — beware. Such a throwaway aphorism may actually be a good indicator that you're stuck with a wishy-washy chief, chained to the most extreme conformism.

It also goes to suggest that this new captain of your industry may think he is quite something. After all, isn't calling upon great writers a way of pretending you're standing among them — at least a little?

Pontificating to their employees like Napoleon galvanizing his troops at the foot of the pyramids.

While inspirational quotes may be useful, to a certain extent — by allowing managerial discourse to burst out of its strict hierarchical shell and impenetrable jargon — they're all too often taken out of context. Trying too hard to add wisdom to one's words only winds up emphasizing their absolute vacuity. So much so that resorting to Confucius or Seneca in order to show, say, the potential of conquering more markets in the ball-bearing sector, may in the end prove more comical than convincing.

Churchill, rallying the troops in 1945 — Photo: UK government

Another downside of using truisms is that they can lead to multiple interpretations, or worse: They can be used to share bad news surreptitiously. That failure-and-success quote attributed to Churchill could easily be dusted off by some random human resources manager trying to sneak into the conversation that people are about to get the boot.

There's another sign that the entrepreneurial mythology is now chasing its own tail: Steve Jobs' or Elon Musk's words are finding their way into speeches by CEOs of smaller and less innovative companies, who then start pontificating to their employees like Napoleon galvanizing his troops at the foot of the pyramids. Better still: It looks like any entrepreneur can now fancy himself or herself as the author of their very own managerial haikus — bad ones at that — earworms meant to hammer their thoughts into your mind.

In such a vertical vision of things, self-quoting could be seen as the perfect software to drive the company's values and spirit into the employee's ever-so-slightly-dense hardware. But you are under no obligation to concur with me. As Oscar Wilde once quipped, "Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong."

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Society

What's Spoiling The Kids: The Big Tech v. Bad Parenting Debate

Without an extended family network, modern parents have sought to raise happy kids in a "hostile" world. It's a tall order, when youngsters absorb the fears (and devices) around them like a sponge.

Image of a kid wearing a blue striped sweater, using an ipad.

Children exposed to technology at a very young age are prominent today.

Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ — A 2021 report from the United States (the Youth Risk Behavior Survey) found that 42% of the country's high-school students persistently felt sad and 22% had thought about suicide. In other words, almost half of the country's young people are living in despair and a fifth of them have thought about killing themselves.

Such chilling figures are unprecedented in history. Many have suggested that this might be the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but sadly, we can see depression has deeper causes, and the pandemic merely illustrated its complexity.

I have written before on possible links between severe depression and the time young people spend on social media. But this is just one aspect of the problem. Today, young people suffer frequent and intense emotional crises, and not just for all the hours spent staring at a screen. Another, possibly more important cause may lie in changes to the family composition and authority patterns at home.

Firstly: Families today have fewer members, who communicate less among themselves.

Young people marry at a later age, have fewer children and many opt for personal projects and pets instead of having children. Families are more diverse and flexible. In many countries, the number of children per woman is close to or less than one (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong among others).

In Colombia, women have on average 1.9 children, compared to 7.6 in 1970. Worldwide, women aged 15 to 49 years have on average 2.4 children, or half the average figure for 1970. The changes are much more pronounced in cities and among middle and upper-income groups.

Of further concern today is the decline in communication time at home, notably between parents and children. This is difficult to quantify, but reasons may include fewer household members, pervasive use of screens, mothers going to work, microwave ovens that have eliminated family cooking and meals and, thanks to new technologies, an increase in time spent on work, even at home. Our society is addicted to work and devotes little time to minors.

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