Will the day China gets properly ensnared in western woolly thinking be the day it loses its competitive edge?

LAST WEEK I received a press release that began: “Starcom MediaVest Group of Greater China, in its mission to transform into a Human Experience Company, today unveils . . .”

There were two words in this that made me sit up, and they weren’t “Human Experience”, daft as those clearly were. Instead, the words were “Greater China”. Management bulls**t, it seems, has finally arrived in the People’s Republic.

The release went on meaninglessly, moronically: “Our dream is to grow our clients’ business by transforming human behaviour through uplifting, meaningful human experiences.”

Admittedly, this drivel isn’t of the homemade Chinese variety but an import from the West: the company in question is owned by Publicis. Still, the presentation being “unveiled” contained marketing waffle with diagrams shaped like flowers whose petals were labelled Community, Currency, Content and Conversation.

The very day I was e-mailed this nonsense, the lead story on FT.com was that Chinese growth had slowed. Though the two stories were unrelated, I found myself putting them together and wondering if the day that China gets properly ensnared in western woolly thinking will be the day it finally loses its competitive edge.

There are already signs that Chinese companies are copying this sort of imported drivel; it would be extraordinary if they weren’t, given that the US guff germ has spread everywhere else.

You could say that it doesn’t matter. Indeed, one of the most enduring mysteries in business is that there appears to be no link between talking nonsense and performing poorly.

No day at work passes without me being sent something from a perfectly successful company that has adopted management talk with no obvious ill effects. The other day I was forwarded something from a consultant at Deloitte in South Africa who wrote: “My primary role . . . is to share thought-ware and initiate and manage online business-related conversations . . .”

I don’t know exactly what thought-ware is but it sounds a bit like Tupperware, only with fewer practical uses.

Deloitte continues to employ people in roles so dubious that they themselves can’t even explain what they do, yet the firm still makes a lot of money.

Equally, in the UK, Standard Life, which has recently showed signs of getting itself in order, is spouting more guff than ever. In a recent presentation to analysts it showed a slide describing an “employee journey” saying: “Our retail pre- and post-retirement solutions leverage ongoing customer engagement.” Who wrote that, I wonder?

The next slide read: “Three main drivers are presenting us with a unique ‘watershed’ opportunity.”

The only good thing about this was the spurious inverted commas around watershed, suggesting the author was experiencing some discomfort at the scale of the linguistic crimes being committed.

And yet this isn’t the full picture. The reason companies like these get away with it is to do with scale. In a large, established business, bad words and even bad thinking don’t do financial damage. The same isn’t true for smaller businesses.

Last week I found evidence for a link between hot air and poor performance – at least in young vulnerable businesses.

A company called Diaspora*, which has had the rather good idea of launching a site like Facebook but without the need to post all of your secrets centrally, put out a message to its entire address book. “Dear X – We love you. Yes. Really, we do,” it began. “We believe in you. You’re one of the innovators, the creative ones, the people who make the world awesome.”

More paragraphs of buttering up followed, after which it proceeded to beg for money – as little as $25 (€18) would make a difference.

“Every time someone contributes, it feels like a huge, warm hug.”

Alas, the recipients didn’t feel like they had been hugged. Instead of coughing up they are posting sarky comments on Twitter.

The Diaspora* e-mail caused offence not because US audiences are cynical but because they are naive.

They take words at face value, and so when the words are wildly, sick-makingly disingenuous, they finally notice and get upset.

The Chinese, surely, are different. They have all been weaned on political lies and obfuscation. Searching for a tiny sliver of truth or meaning in flannel is the nation’s comparative advantage.

When management guff arrives big time in China, my prediction is that they will be better at dealing with it than westerners – just as they are better at so much else. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011)