The Other Side of Business

The borish Australian  had a different problem.  AcaDEMics, he grrred when he said it,  ‘are useless,  fullstop’.  Followed by another  ‘Full Stop’  for extra gravity.

As it turned out he was a man smarting from a string of ungratifying  interactions with academics and universities. These included the appointment of an academic to the top job at a  prized consulting venue, his dumping from a project involving Australian academics and  other incidents where he had  been  belittled and likely oppressed by the pointy hats.

By consultant I mean someone who is selling knowledge to businesses or the self-help or professional friend industry. In this ‘space’​, to quote the current vernacular,  knowledge is divided up and neatly presented for sale.  It needs to be  simple, easily consumable and easily recyclable into multiple formats. It needs a ring of common sense and a wider ring of confidence, indexed by soundbites from big name users. And it should be plausible but not obvious. It should be like a  herring on a hook. It looks like it is swimming freely and a tasty meal but really it’s bait with a longer relationship in mind.

Now I’m not throwing stones at people making a living from a few nuggets that they are found or developed. What I do find hard to bear is transference  onto academics of the frustrations that arise from playing in this particularly muddy knowledge pond.

So what charges did the Australian lay? Academics are good at writing papers and not fit for much  else  – and  useless at  working with practitioners. Fair cop! Academics are trained to do research and write papers. The skills of tracking down lucrative leads and securing  a two minute audience with a CEO who might, and its a big might,  then invite them to work for them  is beyond almost all academics. And yes of course they can get away with lecturing young people but would  struggle in the heat of the consulting assignment. But is ‘useless’ the right word here? Is ‘variable uses’ better?

Secondly, Governments are unjustifiably in the thrall of ‘the academic’ to whom they pay hefty sums for ‘research’ that is worse than useless to everyone apart from the paper writing academics themselves (This actually has a hint of the  pot and the kettle about it). Perhaps this is a fair cop! But what the Government or corporation or other institutional formation is buying (at its best!) is not more ‘pay attention’ or ‘take notes’, but (at its best) something  a little more challenging, something a little less  polished for the  customer’s cheque book and something  a bit  more difficult to chew and swallow than  the  lollies  handed out in the consultant’s pick and mix selection.

And third, they, them, those guys, the grrr academics . . .  are sponges on society.  Perhaps! But a sponge could also be a metaphor for a kind of symbolic universe from which others, including consultants, draw and whom have neither the time nor inclination to develop or maintain.  In other words, and without getting all epistemological about it, academics occupy a quite different ‘space’ in the knowledge food chain.

But of course none of these points make a blind bit of difference to our ‘grrr-ing’ Australian. For him the sooner the pointy hats stepped into the road and were run down by a fleet of Ferrari driving CEOs desiring of his coloured stones the better – full stop!