Not long ago, I watched a LinkedIn video that defined a ‘thought leader’ as “a person who helps people make difficult choices by being a decision leader.” As a philosopher, I wasn’t too impressed with this display. And as a definition of ‘thought leader,’ that’s about as unhelpful as it gets.
But I think it shows us a few things about business jargon and the nature of the ‘business intellectual.’ What does it show us?
Business Jargon and Circularity
So, first, we should notice right away that most business jargon carries circularity of one kind of another. Or, at best, it just remains open-ended. People define a ‘thought leader’ as a ‘decision leader.’ At best, that’s just defining one unclear term in terms of another unclear term. At worst, it’s just using two different terms to get at the same undefined thing.
Why does this happen? To put it bluntly, the business world is full of pseudo intellectuals and dilettantes. Lots of people with no academic training (an MBA is not an academic degree, it’s a professional one) want the aura and credibility of academia. But they don’t want to put in the work. And so, they coin a bunch of meaningless terms and jargon.
The Thought Leader as Business Intellectual
This takes us naturally to the idea of the thought leader as business intellectual. I put it in quotes in the title of this post as the quotes of suspicion. In truth, there are few real business intellectuals. Mostly just corporate leaders, middle managers, or project managers trying to sound smart.
I often focus on the explicitly bad parts of this. In particular, I’ve been interested in how companies use jargon to trick employees, make their work sound lofty, or assert various forms of dominance over their workers. They also bring to the table a dizzying array of euphemisms for firing workers.
But often it’s much more innocent than this. In fact, corporate leaders must continually sell themselves to companies. Many of them switch jobs and companies every few years. And they need to stay fresh.
What better way to stay fresh than to sell themselves as a thought leader to a bunch of HR folks and other leaders woefully unqualified to evaluate the accuracy of their terms and claims?
That’s the ticket!
