Thought Management – Non-Thinking for Losers!

The thing with writing for a living is that you notice little shifts in the business paradigm as new notions start to emerge and take hold.  One month clients are queuing up for Mind Mapping articles, the next it’s Team Auditing, or Ice Berg Thinking, or Management through drum beats or whatever principle some supposed Business Guru is telling you to use. Generally you need no qualification beyond sticking your nose in where it’s not really wanted to be a self-certified Business leader.  It helps if you have a colour printer so that you can make bogus certificates for others with less brain than you to fawn over, but if you can regularly state the bleedin’ obvious and make it sound like some new-fangled principle, those sporting less perception than you will lap it up on spades.  This month, everyone has jumped on the Thought Management train, and boy is that chuffing along at full throttle!

The principle is that you leave all non-project specific thoughts you may have at the meeting room door and focus only on the requirements in hand I.E the project.  So when Geoff from Design is telling you why his part of the project is going to be late (nb, it’s because his team’s rubbish and he has no control over them, in case you were wondering), you should listen to his every tortured metaphor with full attention, rather than hope that Melody is going to make that rather lovely grillé poitrine de perdrix avec du piment et sauce à l'orange that you enjoy so much for supper, or wonder if Geoff’s wife ever remarks on the excessive amount of nostril hair he chooses to sport.  So every thought must be filtered to remove anything that detracts from whatever it is that you are supposed to be thinking about.

Let’s just think about that for a moment……….can you imagine how hard it is not to think about all the other stuff ?  What’s for lunch, how yummy lunch was, does that new secretary in Sales take it up the a*se – you know, really thoughtful stuff.  Can you really imagine not having those thoughts anymore, and just spending you time focussing on the hairy tendrils spouting from Geoff’s ears and nostrils ?  Naaaa, me neither.

Thought Management is the kind of toss bought to you from the same minds that conjoured up Mind Mapping and One-Minute Management.  I had a One-Miniute Manager once – one minute he was a twat, and the next minute and oily arse.

 

 

 

Business trends have been around ever since it became apparent that management is actually pretty easy, and those in the job sought to make it seem more difficult than it is.  Since then, we have had all manner of business smoke and mirrors, with most of it designed by people who have never led in their lives and have no idea what team leadership really is.  Therefore, they concoct new fangled ideas which the effet manager laps up and regurgitates as fact.

The Peter Principle is alive and well in much of industry, and it uses notions such as Thought Management as its fodder.