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| Friday's Phrase: "visibility" |
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| Friday, 09 July 2004 | |
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09
July, 2004: In the first of our new weekly series covering executive
'newspeak', industry psychobabble and collateral language in the
technology sector, we consider "visibility". Friday's Phrase is a weekly look at how clumsy clichés and pseudo-technology jargon shape and distort our industry. These are the sort of phrases which, upon hearing them or reading them, you should demand that the user explain – in full. We start with an old one – but a very good one indeed. When Shakespeare's Hamlet speaks of "a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance", he might just as well have been referring to modern industry usage of the term 'visibility'. For the word is seldom used in isolation (and thus in a positive sense) but more often with respect to its "breach", its negative context: 'lack of visibility'. The irony is that nobody ever really talked of 'visibility' until it was gone – at which point everybody began talking about 'lack of visibility' a great deal while desperately trying to work out what the heck was going on in the the aftermath of the technology sector's collapse. 'Lack of visibility' became an executive's mantra: a sort of 'transcendental obfuscation', as it were. But it is here that the scrutiny of Friday's Phrase goes beyond linguistic pedantry. It is here that the 'breach/observance' ratio once attested to by Shakespeare becomes less pretentious and more directly relevant to 21st century corporate misery in the telecom and related industries. In short, when shell-shocked industry chiefs (even the honest ones) embarked on an endless repetition of mea culpa-type confessions to shareholders and the market, their chosen phrase became 'lack of visibility'. Industry recovery? "Can't say – lack of visibility." Is there a new dawn on the horizon? "Sorry – lack of visibility." The term plays well with the bull-minded bourse-mongers who sit in the world's financial centres trying to work out what has gone wrong and when, if ever, it might once again go right. 'Lack of visibility' has been used by manufacturers to explain why service providers might not be buying up moribund inventory and by service providers to justify why their corporate customers might not be increasing their spending on new and advanced services. But here's the kicker. Today's 'lack of visibility' carries the implicit conceit that, at one point, there was 'visibility'. This is straight out of the "On a clear day, you can see forever…" school of management optimism. So what were these visionaries seeing when the 'visibility' was so much better? An end to the old-style PTTs. The death of 'bricks and mortar' companies in sectors ranging from banking to bookselling, slain on the altar of e-commerce. New paradigms. Etc. 'Lack of visibility' means simply "we don't know what will happen in the months and years ahead"; but its flipside, 'visibility', is a way of saying "we can see into the future"; most often such predictions are balls – albeit of the crystal variety . If you need some positive spin on this, start by asking why people and companies who were so misguided in their optimism should be taken at their word in their stream of pessimistic outpourings. We now know that many of the upbeat forecasts in the era of 'visibility' had more to do with personal greed than any realistic assessment of the market's prospects. Now, the 'lack of visibility' could be working in the opposite direction, the product of a bunch of industry leaders running scared from their shareholders and in fear of losing their jobs and their pensions (and what remains of their share options). Another reason for this clouded vision could be that several major players, by their past actions, have merely written themselves out of the script. So Company 'X' can't see a way out of the slump in a certain market segment? That's because Company 'Y' is leading that march into the next generation and those who claim 'lack of visibility' cannot see that it's happening. From the broader market's perspective this is not so much 'lack of visibility' as 'invisibility' – and that's a very lonely place to be. Jim Chalmers |
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