Language can bug you badly.

There’s one thing I could never take my head around: it’s that newspeak habit of talking about ‘resources’ rather than ‘people’ or ‘time’. ‘We’re under-resourced’ is a lamentation I hear frequently, but really, what does it mean? Is it that whatever project is conducted does not have enough people on it? Is it that managerial models are heavy, so that a given goal takes longer to reach than it should? Is it that every person in the team has, literally, so much to do on a daily basis that they cannot physically keep up, things don’t get done, and the whole fabric collapses? Or is it a polite way to say ‘disorganised’ and ‘a bit lazy’.

My Asian friends are not tender with Australians. As a Hong Kong friend once said: ‘Australian, you know, they’re bit lazy sometime’. More polite mainland friends will talk about how ‘relaxed’ everyone is, with an ironic snarl. Even as a Frenchman, I’m often appalled at how slow things can be here.

And so, I started thinking back on my reading of the French moralists, at a time before corporate newspeak, and when people could be held accountable in other ways. What if ‘resources’ was not the problem? What if the problem was character, accountability? And what if we tried systematically calling things by their concrete name – and replace ‘resources’ with ‘people’ or ‘time’ whenever possible. Maybe this would bring up better thinking.