Is Anybody There?

My colleague just said 'we need to think outside the box on this,' without realizing, of course, that using the expression 'thinking outside the box' is about as far inside the box as anyone's thinking can get; so far deep inside the proverbial box, in fact, that I doubt they will ever get out again. 

My colleague thinks about thinking outside the box without understanding that the box has become himself. What he believes to be new ideas are merely the same old recycled contents of the box concealed in different colored bubble wrap. And it's not really even a box. It's more of a cardboard coffin where his defunct brain is laid to rest. 

But my colleague's brain will never rest in peace because it's constantly quoting chapter and verse from "Fifty Techniques For Increasing Your Sales." The grave of his mind is a conference room echoing with corporate cliches and executive aphorisms. An unquiet soul wearing a power tie and casual Friday clothes. 

I suppose we should send flowers to my colleague's desk: Sorry for your loss, except it's our loss as well in a way for God knows we need another working brain these days. Instead, here we are holding a seance with his empty skull and I write the words 'fraudulent medium' on my memo pad.

Comments

[John]

Here's a theory of business theories: all of these should be, indeed can be, condensed to limericks. Or haiku. Or expanded to the dimensions of those art forms, and not a syllable beyond. Surely "thinking outside the box" lends itself to that. Where it shouldn't be, of course, is inside a whole book. Was it? Probably.

The only such books I've ever read are Up The Organization and The Peter Principle. I read the former only because I saw it in a Johannesburg bookshop window decades after, and what felt like a million miles from, its debut. I read the latter only because it was mentioned in The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading, and Bubblegum Book. Oh, and then there was the time I was bicycling near the University of Nebraska and it started to rain so I took shelter in the bookstore, and while there decided to inspect the required and optional texts for Marketing classes. I cannot imagine coming to any business book via less tortuous routes. Such as, "There's something I need to know about business right now."

Not to be contemptuous of it, or of any scholarship that might be brought to bear on it. But what could that scholarship concentrate on? Management theory doesn't yet have enough doggerel and it may not have any historiography. At least I don't think it is the custom in any one such book to acknowledge the existence of any other such book. (Giving your competition free advertising would be bad business, no?)

[Stephenesque]

Most of the business truisms I value were accidental discoveries, whether divine nudges or simple serendipity I know not. I don’t recall learning anything about business from a book I purposefully sat down to read. So I guess it’s not so much a matter of learning to think outside “the box” as waiting for the box to be delivered as a surprise package and then deciding what to make of the contents. Frankly, these days, I think we operate in a world of strategic magical thinking rather than hard won experience. People are more inclined to listen to the showman-wizard wearing business casual than the pinstriped yeoman. Perhaps that’s all for the best. I guess it depends on what you’re selling and to whom you are selling it.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment