Fixing the Language of “Pass the Buck”

By Jeffrey Pfeffer

Passive voice and sentence structure that diffuses responsibility just infuriate me. I’m sure we’ve all sat at an airport, waiting for a delayed flight, and heard a customer service representative announce that the airline apologizes for the delay but “the incoming equipment has arrived late.” As though the airplane itself decided to take off and arrive late. Today’s example: an advertisement for a Wall Street Journal conference on the financial crisis that claims “the world’s financial system has broken down. Credit remains constrained, markets and regulatory regimes have failed.”

The world’s financial system hasn’t “broken down,” someone — or some set of someones — broke it. Credit isn’t “constrained,” as though some mysterious force field is at work. Financial institutions and their leaders are not making loans, and banks that have received billions of dollars of governmental aid are buying distressed financial assets at fire sale prices instead of renegotiating loans and making new ones.

The last assertion really irritates me. Regulatory regimes haven’t failed. Instead, deregulation triumphed, pushed by many of the same business executives who now complain about economic conditions and advocated by the very same newspaper that now wants to hold a conference to profit from the troubles it helped produce. As a consequence, there weren’t enough regulatory staff overseeing the U.S. economy — which is why we now have not only a financial meltdown but issues of toy safety and food contamination in products ranging from spinach to hamburger meat to peanut butter. Between 1990 and 2006, the total dollars in the U.S. budget spent for overseeing finance and banking increased just 25 percent. And here’s an even more dramatic statistic: Between 1980 and 2006, a period covering more than a quarter-century of rapid expansion of the financial sector, the number of full-time equivalent Federal employees regulating finance and banking went up by less than 2,300.

What goes on in public discourse happens inside companies and nonprofit organizations as well. A phrase like “customer service has decreased” leaves those responsible for the decisions that resulted in poorer customer service mysteriously unidentified.

George Orwell, in his wonderful 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” noted that language can corrupt thought. We apprehend the world based on the language we use, which is why Confucius said that the first thing he’d do if he were appointed to rule a country would be to fix the language. That is to say, if we actually want accountability and responsibility in the public and private sector, we need to fix our language. We should name those who make decisions and implement policies and then not forget either the people or the decisions when those choices fail.

DaVita is a large kidney dialysis company that has among the best clinical outcomes in the industry. I wrote a case on the company and have spent a lot time studying its culture. One of its core values is accountability; DaVita believes it produces service excellence. Accountability means that when the CEO has failed to remedy a problem, he stands in front of hundreds of employees and admits it. In doing so, he also admits that the situation is unacceptable. When he doesn’t know something, he admits that, too, instead of making stuff up and hoping for the best. No language of “the machine was not repaired,” but instead acknowledgement of who and what failed and why.

Accountability is the first step toward learning and improvement. If “the regulatory regime failed,” we don’t know why or how. If, instead, we note that specific people pushed for specific policies that resulted in insufficient staff to do the jobs they had, we are on the way to understanding and fixing the problem, as well as preventing its recurrence.

In both companies and society, we would be well served to speak the truth. It may be unpopular or difficult, but as DaVita’s CEO Kent Thiry told me, you can’t fix a problem if you don’t acknowledge and understand its cause — or even its existence.

Jeffrey Pfeffer is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and is the author or co-author of 12 books including “What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management.”

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