By-Passing the Jury Through Mediation or Arbitration - Venable LLP

BULLSHIT
DETECTORS
Some crap about crap
D
o you give lip service to
“getting close to the customer”
while refusing to pay a live
person to answer the phones?
(Full disclosure: we do) Do
you sit around in meetings and
say “What story are we going to sell?”
as if, the simple truth were not an
option? Are scheming and concocting
critical components of your marketing
process? If so, congratulations –
you are part of the modern
bullshit epidemic. Don’t worry,
it’s a big club.
Bullshit, it seems, is reaching
a kind of cultural watershed.
Much like when it
became trendy for movie directors
to “turn the camera
around” and make movies
about making movies, book
publishers are suddenly scrambling
to theorize about bullshit.
The entomology of the word
“bullshit” suggests that popular
use of the term is less than 100
years old, appearing on the
scene sometime during World
War I. Oh what a difference a
century can make. It’s not that
bullshit itself is only 100 years
old, but it is increasingly clear
to everybody that the modern
information explosion includes
far more deception than
straightforwardness. Mostly, we
shrug and move on. Others
write books as a form of therapy.
None of these three books
achieves any kind of greatness.
I wouldn’t recommend any of
them outright, unless your
interest in the topic is strong.
Frankfurt’s work, On Bullshit,
is the best written, by far, but
the book is conjured in the
typical dry and detached style
of an academic text. I literally
fell asleep while reading it and the
book is only 67 pages long – small
pages, at that.
Frankfurt, who is a professor of philosophy
at Princeton, has taken a serious,
yet lighthearted approach to the
topic, which I very much liked. His
brevity and thoughtfully considered
conservation of words is equally appropriate
to the topic. His chief contribution
here is a philosophical delineation
of the difference between lies and bullshit.
It’s an amusing riff on the various
shades of deception.
Penny’s work is far more lively, but
is fatally marred by a political agenda
and annoying shortcuts that suggest a
hastily written book. Penny, a 30-yearold
teaching fellow at King’s College in
All Marketers
Are Liars
The Power of Telling
Authentic Stories in
a Low-Trust World
By Seth Godin
Penguin Books
(Portfolio)
183 pages
On Bullshit
Halifax, looks a little older than her
age and writes much younger. Too
often she descends into simple namecalling
for reasons that escaped me. I
enjoy good insults as much as anybody,
but Penny’s barbs are often too incidental
and don’t support the premise.
She’s wasting my time with, well,
extraneous political bullshit. It’s
By Harry G. Frankfurt
Princeton University
Press
67 pages
Your Call is
Important to Us
The Truth
About Bullshit
By Laura Penny
Crown Publishers
245 pages
BULLSHIT, IT SEEMS, IS REACHING A KIND OF CULTURAL
WATERSHED. MUCH LIKE WHEN IT BECAME TRENDY FOR MOVIE
DIRECTORS TO “TURN THE CAMERA AROUND” AND MAKE MOVIES
ABOUT MAKING MOVIES, BOOK PUBLISHERS ARE SUDDENLY
SCRAMBLING TO THEORIZE ABOUT BULLSHIT.
painfully obvious that Penny is a bitter
and disillusioned hard-core Canadian
leftist, but even she concedes that bullshit
is a non-partisan modern plague.
Given that, it should have been a little
harder to discern her leanings. She
incessantly skewers Republicans, which
is fine and appropriate for the times,
but she also treats Bill Clinton as if he
has no relevance to the topic of bullshit.
This is like writing a book on the
history of baseball with only a passing
mention of Babe Ruth.
Penny’s writing is somewhat enjoyable,
but also disappointing. It’s the
work of someone who simply didn’t
think hard enough, didn’t focus enough
and didn’t revise enough. Rather than
come to a conclusion, she simply ended
BOOKSHELF
by David Callahan
the book. And along the way, she didn’t
use the best examples, she used the first
that came to mind. The one exception
is her well-selected title, which references
the trite phrase often heard in
automated phone attendant hell. I was
especially disappointed with her chapter
on advertising and PR firms.
“Advertising and PR make one thing
and one thing only,” Penny writes, “and
that is shit up.” Alright, I thought,
here’s where the rant is going to start
cooking with insight. Instead, Penny
appears to have spent an afternoon
flipping TV channels and
taking notes. She wades right
into the most heavily fertilized
business sector of all and couldn’t
grow a decent crop of conclusions.
The examples served up by
Seth Godin in his book, All
Marketers are Liars, are better
than Penny’s and his tone is
much easier to take, but while
Penny came up with no real
conclusions, Godin offers up
inconsistent ones. Godin claims
that marketers aren’t really liars,
that consumers lie to themselves.
But then he encourages
CEOs to “be authentic” and
notes that the only way to get
people to remark about your
company is to be remarkable in
the first place and not deceive.
Godin is clearly conflicted
about bullshit and suffering
through a love/hate relationship
with it. He tries to have it both
ways, believing there is a strong
line between “a fib and a
fraud.”
So what is the bottom line
on the bullshit books? I’d have
to say that all the authors have
recognized a good topic.
Pseudo-intellectuals might
enjoy Frankfurt’s work. Rabid
leftists will undoubtedly appreciate
Penny’s approach. And
business conformists will find comfort
in what Godin has compiled. But none
of these books are very memorable
reads. The hard truth is that the great
book about modern bullshit has yet to
be written and maybe never will be.
Thusfar, the most effective slayers of
bullshit have picked their battles far
more selectively.
www.smartceo.com August 2005 Baltimore SmartCEO 27