Tag Archives: Harvard Business Review

Maddening Jargon, Jargon Madness: Another Note on “The Ask”

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I recently had a brief exchange with Deborah Mills-Scofield about a blog post she’d written on HBR.org entitled “The Power of Your Network Is the Ask.” I didn’t take issue with her argument in that post. I focused, instead, on her use of the phrase “the ask,” an insidious piece of corporate jargon I’ve written about before.

Mills-Scofield was gracious and good-humored about the whole thing. Our exchange on HBR.org and on Twitter sent me back to some of the ideas I’d entertained in my original post – about asking, taking initiative and action – and I decided it would be a good idea to find some more examples of business people using “the ask.” I thought some new attestations might help me think a little more about this locution: What does it express? What does it keep from being expressed? How does it change the request? The relationship? The results?

Forbes.com seemed like a good place to start looking for examples. I expected to find CEOs and managers quoted by the magazine’s writers, and my plan, such as it was, was to start skewering and lambasting and mocking them and calling them barbarians – or something along those lines, I wasn’t exactly sure. Instead, I found something puzzling: Forbes writers themselves were pushing the word.

For instance, a contributing writer offers this advice on seeking a promotion: “The most important part of asking for a promotion is preparing ahead of time. When you make the ask, you’ll need to prove (with specifics) that you’re ready for the next step” [italics mine].

Seeing the word used in this way, I wonder if this nominative use of “ask” has roots in Wall Street jargon, which sometimes designates the lowest price of a stock offer as “the ask price,” and if the person asking for the promotion here would be surprised to discover that she had represented herself in these dehumanizing terms. In any case, it appears that the editors at Forbes are not too worried about these ugly metaphors, and not very scrupulous when it comes to what’s a noun and what’s a verb.

Examples abound. Here’s Meghan Casserly, a Forbes staff writer, in an article that promises to disclose “The Five Secrets of Successful Silicon Valley Women.” Watch what happens to the verb “ask” in the space of two short paragraphs (emphasis mine):

“We know too surely that women ask for too little money when seeking funding for their businesses,” says [Deborah] Perry Piscione, but she’s seen the women of Silicon Valley start to self-correct when they approach the investors of Sand Hill Road. “The strategy is asking for twice as much as you believe you’ll need.”
But it isn’t just in fundraising that Perry Piscione says Silicon Valley women excel in the “ask.” Several years ago friend and venture capitalist Heidi Roizen mentioned she was having trouble adding another corporate board seat to her resume. “I sort of shyly asked her if she’d be okay admitting this to the women at an Alley to the Valley event,” she says, thinking Roizen might be embarrassed to share that she was struggling. Roizen’s response was the opposite. “She said ‘Of course I want to talk about it!’”

Maybe one of the things that makes “serial entrepreneur” Deborah Perry Piscione so successful is that she uses verbs as verbs. Hard to say, but it’s clear who’s doing the reifying here: it’s Casserly, not Perry Piscione. I suppose it counts for something that Casserly puts “the ask” in quotation marks: she’s quoting, or thinks she’s quoting, the lingua franca of the Valley. Maybe so, or maybe the only people who talk that way in the Valley are those who see human interactions as mere transactions.

That’s really the point. It’s worse than annoying: this kind of jargon grates on the ear because it offends the soul. Words matter – in magazine articles, in negotiations, in every day relationships; people are not indifferent to the words you use. “Language most shows a man: speak that I may see thee,” wrote Ben Jonson. And “the ask,” as I suggested in my first post on the topic, shows among other things that you don’t have much interest in asking, or in the true power of asking, at all.

Sure, we slip and we are lazy, or we try to talk like we belong to the club, but it’s important to to catch ourselves. To their credit, the editors of Forbes themselves nominated “the ask” for the magazine’s Jargon Madness 2013, a bracket elimination of “head-splitting corporate speak”. “Ask (n.)” was eliminated in the first round, losing out to “Rock Star.” I guess some things are more annoying and more offensive than others.

A Second Note on The First CEO: the CEO As Agent of Historical Change

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Susy Jackson, an editor at Harvard Business Review, emailed me last week to tell me that she and her colleagues had discovered an illustration of the acronym “CEO” that predates the early instances discussed in my previous post on this subject.  Time to update that post and, while we’re at it, the entry on CEO in the Oxford English Dictionary. (I’ve emailed them to let them know).

A search through the HBR archives (one of Jackson’s colleagues described it as “not really very scientific, but fun”) turned up an article in the May June-1970 issue of HBR by Joseph O Eastlack, Jr. and and Phillip R. McDonald entitled “The Role of the CEO in Corporate Growth.” As we might expect, the article takes care to spell out and abbreviate the term in its first use: “chief executive officer (CEO)”; the speculation is that this was “standard treatment for a term that was thought to be known to HBR readers, but not so familiar that they could dispense with spelling it out altogether.” In 1970, after all, the CEO had just arrived on the scene.

A few thoughts about that entrance.

In my previous post I speculated that the term CEO may have come into wider use at HBR under the editorial direction of Ralph Lewis, who was appointed editor in chief in 1971, and oversaw several changes in editorial direction. This 1970 illustration of CEO predates that appointment; Edward Bursk was the editor in chief of HBR in 1970. Still, there’s no doubt HBR under Lewis’ direction helped define and disseminate the term.

Whether this more frequent recourse to the acronym in the pages of HBR was the result of Lewis’ policy or just a sign of the currency the acronym was gaining in management and governance discourse is hard to say. But it’s pretty clear that the wide acceptance of the acronym in the 1970s marks a shift – not just in editorial convention, but also in ideas about governance, leadership and power, within and without the corporation. By the mid to late 1970s, CEO is well on its way to becoming not just a convenient tag but an important construct of corporate power, social status and (by the 1980s) cultural celebrity.

The temptation to start painting on a broader canvas is almost irresistible. After all, big things are happening in the early 1970s, in business, in American society, around the world. When the figure of the CEO emerges in the 1970s, the heyday of the man in the gray flannel suit has reached its nadir. In America and throughout the industrialized West, the postwar boom – which witnessed the rise of the managerial class – has yielded to a grim post-industrial reality.

Indeed, the CEO will be one of the defining figures of the period that runs from roughly 1970 to 2010, the post-industrial period. In response to falling profit rates in manufacturing, we see during this period “a shift from productive enterprise to financial manipulation” (as Chomsky, summarizing economic historian Robert Bremmer, recently put it); I think it’s no coincidence that with the arrival of the CEO on the scene, the “financialization” of the economy has begun. (I understand the word is controversial; but let it stand for now: these are just broad strokes.)

The CEO emerges from this shift. He is its creature and creator – an agent entrusted with its execution – and the period of the CEO’s glory extends from the triumph of neo-liberalism during the Reagan-Thatcher era all the way to the financial crisis of 2008 and the institutional failures and social collapse it precipitates.

The First CEO

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For some time now, I have been wondering when and how the acronym “CEO” came into general use. This isn’t just a matter of idle etymological interest. CEO is one of those rare acronyms – like scuba, radar, and snafu – that have become words. And in the course of becoming a word, CEO has redefined our world.

I was intrigued by the entry in Webster’s Dictionary that seemed to pinpoint the date: 1975. Only Webster’s didn’t provide a citation or attestation. So I wrote to the publisher at the beginning of March to ask where this first CEO might be found. A mere two weeks later, a reply came from Joanne M. Despres, Etymology Editor at Merriam-Webster. She informed me that Webster’s researchers had found that first illustration of CEO in a British publication, Neville Osmond’s Handbook for Managers, volume 2 (London, 1975).

But it turns out they had not dug deep enough: “In reviewing the standard sources we use to research dates,” Despres wrote, “I noticed that the Oxford English Dictionary now reports pre-1975 evidence of the word’s existence.” The 2011 online edition of the OED reaches back across the Atlantic, to America, and a little further back in time, a few years earlier, to the March-April 1972 issue of the Harvard Business Review: there we discover “a technician in his early forties who joined the company three years ago as president but not CEO.” (In light of this new evidence, Despres has requested that Webster’s “date for CEO be revised at the first opportunity.”)

I hoped to find but I didn’t find an even earlier illustration yesterday, when I went to the New York Public Library to track down Despres’ OED reference and review past editions of the Harvard Business Review on microfilm. I still have a number of leads to follow. But in the course of my reading it became tolerably clear that someone at the Harvard Business Review made an editorial decision in late 1971 or early 1972 to start using – or allowing the use of — the acronym CEO. This was right around the time Ralph F. Lewis was named editor of the Review (in 1971). Lewis instituted a number of important changes at the Review; this fateful concession to shorthand may have been one of the more minor changes he made, but it had immediate consequences.

Once the term is allowed into the Review, it begins to populate the pages of the journal. There is no turning back. Along with the instance cited by the OED editors, there are a number of early illustrations of CEO in the Review of 1972. This one appears in Myles L. Mace’s article on “The President and the Board of Directors”: “I use the title ‘president’ to mean the chief executive officer, recognizing that in some corporations the CEO may have the title ‘chairman of the board.’” (Mace’s earlier articles for the Review, in 1965 and 1966, use “chief operating executive,” “chief executive,” and “president,” but not CEO. His Directors: Myth and Reality, published in 1971, adheres to the same long form usage.) We find the newfangled acronym, again, in “Conflict at the Summit: A Deadly Game” by Alonzo McDonald. Here, McDonald takes some care in introducing it:

Leaders are still consumed with the problem of how to organize the summit. Inevitably, it is the first topic that a newly appointed chief executive officer (CEO) wants to discuss with his most trusted counselors and confidants.

And then he can use it freely:

Many CEOs who sincerely see themselves in the role of moral leaders are perceived by others as confirmed and passionate addicts of power.

The point is not that the Harvard Business Review foisted the term CEO on us. It had most likely been in use, in the MBA classroom and in the corporate boardroom, for some time. The Review certainly helped disseminate the acronym; and it’s worth remembering that readers, subscribers and contributors were then, as now, influential, powerful and connected to other influential and powerful people. McDonald, for instance, would be named Managing Director at McKinsey in 1973. Lewis came to the Review from accounting firm Arthur Young and was “director of several prominent corporations”; at the time of his death in 1979, he sat on the boards of Houghton Mifflin, Twentieth- Century Film Corporation, and Paine, Webber, among others. Mace was one of the leading lights of Harvard Business School and served, as well, on a number of boards.

Mace’s work on the role of directors (in Myth and Reality) was especially influential and timely. There was then, as now, an urgent need for new bearings – a new orientation; and the sense that it is time to dispense with institutionalized illusions and find new direction goes well beyond issues of corporate governance. New, big, disturbing questions about the role of business in society, the counter-culture and the emerging global economic order are coming to a head. It’s not without significance that it’s at this moment – at the dawn of late twentieth-century neoliberalism — that CEO makes its first appearance.

It is only a matter of a decade or so before the word is regularly in the newspapers, on the TV, and on everyone’s lips, and the CEO has become what he is today: a cultural icon, celebrated and hated, creator and destroyer, a symbol of American success or the villain behind America’s current woes.

UPDATE: For a slightly earlier (1970) illustration of the acronym and some further discussion, see this post.