Beyond work-life balance there are four other important areas in which we have been steadily creating less, rather than more, balance – education, communications, religion and sex.

Education has become unbalanced because we have separated learning from wisdom; communications, because we have separated interaction from honesty; religion, because we have separated belief from doubt; sex, because we have separated passion from love. Common to all four areas, and to work-life balance too, is our failure to find relevant measures. Instead of improving how we measure success in any area we accept imperfect yardsticks and then devote our efforts to fulfilling them. The results can be fairly disastrous.

This article addresses education and communications. A future article will discuss imbalance in religion and sex.

The world now has a higher level of education for more people than ever before. Graduates abound; PhDs proliferate. It is cause for celebration because a good education is the third greatest gift we can give children. But just as we don’t give a young person a lot of money without ensuring that they understand the risks inherent in wealth, so we cannot equip them with the equally dangerous tools of knowledge – and, today, access to knowledge through the internet – without making certain that they know the risks of having information without wisdom.

The first mouse knew where the cheese was but the second mouse got it.
The four points of wisdom essential to making use of education are [i] knowing how much we don’t know; [ii] continuing to learn even when we think we are fully educated; [iii] showing that rules, laws and guidelines are for guidance, not slavish obedience, and always need common-sense interpretation; [iv] not overestimating the value of experience which, by itself, never transformed a fool into a wise man.

Here’s a tiny example of stupidity gone mad.
“Please resubmit your invoice adding the words
‘THIS INVOICE HAS BEEN COMPUTER-GENERATED
AND THEREFORE NEEDS NO SIGNATURE’
in order to avoid your having to sign it”.

This came from one of the foremost Universities in Asia.

The dash for qualifications and the reliance placed on them by employers has turned education into cramming. The consequences of this are worrying. For the employer, it implies that his judgment of a candidate can be suspended in favour of a simple weighing of the qualifications. An employee hired only because of paper qualifications is not assessed for common sense, creativity, loyalty or integrity. And yet these four attributes constitute the most important characteristics of an employee – more important than qualifications and experience.

For employees the concept of a purely qualification-based society can be disastrous. Some of the best contributors to the world, many of the great creative brains, laureate composers and writers and truly imaginative inventors would all be ruled out because they had no paper qualifications.

Neither Jack Cohen, founder of TESCO, one of the world’s largest retailers nor Michael Marks, the founder of Marks & Spencer, one of the most successful companies of the twentieth century, had any significant educational qualifications. They now employ the brightest graduates in the west, but they seek common sense and street-wisdom to complement the paper accolades.

The worst consequence of paper-driven employment is the impact on the organisation as a whole. It predetermines promotion, stifles initiative and enterprise and can even lead to employee despair.

Good education teaches us to employ colleagues who are better than we are. Doing so supports and promotes our own position. Hiring supine and conformist subordinates, however good their qualifications, undermines the organisation until it destroys itself. Education is presently unbalanced.

Another excellent way to destroy an organisation is to drown it in jargon.

One of the saddest things I have seen in my life has been the murder of language. As our technical ability to communicate quickly and efficiently has increased – exponentially in the last few years – so abuse by incompetently and unnecessarily invented language has grown to match it. Not just in one language but in all languages. Examples are not necessary. Pick up any official document, any terms and conditions, any contract between two organisations or people and you will see so many that you, too, will weep.

There are several causes. Many organisations want to confuse the customer. Did you read the small print on the last insurance or banking contract you signed? I doubt it. Even if you could see the Point 6 Font in which it was printed, it is unlikely that you would have understood more than twenty percent of the words. Besides, you were probably being urged to sign it quickly while the “special offer” lasted. This form of language abuse is theft, but don’t try prosecuting. You will already have signed away all your rights for honest dealing, competence, promptness and redress. You will very likely have been transformed from victim into perpetrator.

Then there is self-aggrandisement. Spouting a lot of words or mnemonics that others don’t understand makes some people imagine that they are more successful and important than the rest of us. They are, of course, merely making themselves appear ridiculous and insecure.

There is a good jargon game being played in business and official department meetings all round the world. On entering the meeting each participant is given a list of current jargon and incomprehensible mnemonics. As each of these is said, the meeting participants tick off the offending phrase. The first person to complete the list, because all items have been ticked, leaps to his or her feet and shouts “bullshit”.

That’s why it is called Bullshit Bingo.

A more complex slaughter of the language is caused by the widening gap between the sound-bite and the so-called research paper. We cannot avoid sound-bites, and relevant ones have been with mankind since the dawn of civilisation. The warning grunt of Neanderthal Man alerting the arrival of hostile creatures and the sigh of the lovelorn for the knowledge they are still denied are both sound-bites, and useful and expressive ones, too. But a sound-bite is to communication what a peanut is to dinner – titillating to the palate but unsatisfying to the stomach.

At the other extreme is the Research Paper. Deep studies of our world are vital and welcome. They have been the basis of our longevity, our increasingly fulfilled and pain-free lives and of our material well-being. Without them progress would be slow, sporadic and uncertain. However, truly good papers are well-researched, intelligible, devoid of unnecessary complexity and brief.

World War II was won by the Allies party because they insisted that all paper submissions were restricted to one page. Long, tortuous documents allowing the author to cover every aspect of his posterior were forbidden.

Egregious communications, from the “Welcome” door mat to the telesales caller’s chilling “How are you today?” are a form of language prostitution we could all do without. As Peter Ustinov once said in New York when bidden to ‘have a nice day’, “Thank you, but I have other arrangements”. Polite greetings of the “Good morning” and “Good-bye” sort are more honest and project a realistic view of the relationship between the parties communicating. Blaise Pascal had it right in 1851 when he apologised for writing a long letter, adding that he didn’t have time to make it a short one.

It is widely agreed that the world is becoming a more complex place. It has certainly done so in my lifetime. This should surely been seen as the signal for simpler, clearer communications, not for increasingly confusing ones. O that it were practical to impose a word tax; alas, it is not.

Easy and cheap access to communication of every sort offers the possibility of more widespread appreciation of the arts and a deeper understanding of man’s true spirituality – the beauty he creates himself with the tools he was given at birth. Do any of the Communications Degrees so ardently studied today provide this kind of appreciation? Have these courses contributed to the real quality of life?

This is what education and communication are about. More years alive are wasted if, at the end, we cannot say that we have had, within the limits imposed by our genes and the environment in which we were raised, a fulfilled life. Any education that does not contribute to all aspects of fulfillment is not education but training. Any communication that fails to enhance the quality of the precious gift we are given at birth is not informing but selling.

A good education and true communications make life wonderfully fulfilled.

John Bittleston mentors people in their businesses, their jobs and their personal lives.
Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you – Jean-Paul Sartre