THE LIMITS OF MANAGEMENT LANGUAGE

What is new in the world is a matter of emergence and increasing complexity. What is new in our world is a matter of language. We generate the world we live in as we create new distinctions and new ways of speaking. The world is constantly expanding both through its increasing complexity and through our discoveries of that complexity.

Discoveries always have an element of invention in them. A discovery is made and with this comes the invention of ways of distinguishing and speaking about it. Murray Gell-Mann's brilliant contribution to the world of physics has been interpreted in different ways. Some say he discovered the quark, others say he invented it. What he actually did was invent a way of understanding and speaking about the world that was different than our previous way of understanding it or speaking about it. This allowed existing phenomena to be explained more effectively.

In a similar way, the early creators of the franchise way of doing business invented a way of understanding the combination of individual enterprise, marketplace opportunities and approaches to developing effective marketing and production methods in others. MacDonald's invented a way of understanding food delivery that they have continually refined over time. Disney invented a way of understanding delivery of a total experience of entertainment that has not been matched although many have profited by various copies and interpretations. Starbucks invented a way of understanding the coffee business and what people want. Koch Industries invented a way of understanding how to approach business so that entrepreneurial spirit is released - and created the most profitable privately owned company in America.

The world as we know it and share it with others is constructed collectively. That is, we are socialised into a world of language which enables us to understand things and speak about them. Language allows us to turn the chaos of initial sensory bombardment into a coherent universe. We use language to make patterns of things and relate actions to the patterns that we make.