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Political correctness is killing this country, or so I’ve heard.

What I haven’t heard is a clear, crisp definition of what the phrase political correctness means.

When I first heard it I was pretty clear on the concept: It meant I couldn’t tell Polish or Italian jokes anymore. This was back in high school, where my clarity about the concept came courtesy of a much larger and more muscular Polish acquaintance who made certain I understood his point, reinforced by a seriously cute Italian girl who explained that I’d just reduced my chances of dating her to the sort of number mathematicians use negative exponents to express.

Along with the recognition that racially-and ethnically-oriented jokes were in bad taste came an increasingly widespread recognition that the extensive and colorful variety of racial and ethnic pejoratives that had been in common use, and the various stereotypes that had accompanied them, were no longer to be uttered in polite company either.

As my own heritage has in the past been used as a verb meaning “to negotiate beyond the point of reasonableness” — a stereotype I’ve often wished was more accurate when negotiating compensation and consulting rates, even while finding it offensive when spoken aloud — I long-ago made my peace with political correctness.

My perspective is, I recognize, less than universally shared — a situation I always find puzzling. In this case I’ve often wondered if the main problem is one of pronunciation: It should be spoken as “Polite-ical correctness.”

The problem, friends and acquaintances have explained to me, is that the desire to avoid offending anyone has been taken off a cliff, as in the example of calling people who are particularly short in stature “vertically challenged.”

Which leads in turn to the question, why would you want to call attention to someone’s past-two-standard-deviations stature? If they suffered from some other unusual size characteristic … say, unusually small hands … would you … oh, wait. Never mind. We crossed that boundary a couple of months ago.

None of this would be in bounds for Keep the Joint Running were it not for the nature of the most recent attempts to make political correctness socially incorrect.

Which is that right now, among some members of the political (as opposed to the polite-ical) class, political correctness means being forbidden to attach bigoted and factually incorrect stereotypes to all Muslims of all stripes everywhere in the world.

And, for that matter, to all Sikhs as well, because many of those who complain about political correctness aren’t all that well-informed, not only about Islam but also about what it means to wear a turban.

This is a legitimate KJR topic because, in your role as business or IT leader, you’re likely to hear colleagues emulating their favorite political personage or pundit, expounding loudly, unfavorably and in public about Muslims.

Which, whether they realize it or not, insults the DBA, developer, or sysadmin in the next cubicle. One of those who feels offended might report to you. If so, you have a legal responsibility to make sure they don’t work in a threatening and harassing environment.

Depending on your personal moral code, even without HR’s dictates you might figure you have a responsibility to help out someone who’s on the receiving end of verbal bullying, because being a bystander in a situation like this is the sort of passive behavior that won’t make you proud of yourself when you look in the mirror tomorrow morning.

More important than this: Why would you want to let some uninformed lout spew garbage that drives good employees to work for a competitor? We’re all in a fight for talent. That being the case, fight to win.

Sometimes, even with the best of intentions we hold back, for no other reason than that we aren’t sure what to say in embarrassing circumstances like these. If that’s what’s troubling you, be troubled no more.

I recommend starting by looking at the offending party with a sour expression and a don’t-look-away gaze that’s just short of a stare. When you’re sure you have their attention, say, “What you’re saying is offensive and uninformed. You’re welcome to your opinion, but you aren’t welcome to share it here. What you’re doing is a firing offense, so we’re both better off if you button it right now. Save it for a bar after you’ve left the office. People in bars expect to hear folks who have had a few too many expressing their ignorance in loud voices.”

Well, okay, maybe that isn’t the best way to handle it.

Tempting though.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

No, no, no. I wasn’t talking about Social Security and credit card numbers. It’s all the stuff companies claim is uniquely valuable, that has never occurred to competitors, and that would never occur to them unless and until someone sent them a PowerPoint deck.

Last week’s KJR made the case that most businesses have become so permeable that it’s a fact, not a problem, which means they have to deal with it, not solve it.

And further, that the best way to deal with permeability is to take advantage of it as a better path to profitability than trying to build ever-higher and thicker walls around the enterprise.

As all software testers know, good test plans include a plentiful portion of edge cases, so it isn’t surprising some correspondents expressed concern that KJR might take the position that corporations should relax their controls on information whose compromise could result in, for example, identity theft.

These edge cases are good tests, only not of the overall principle. Customer identification and privacy information? Protect it to the best of your ability. Short-term plans where whoever gets to market first wins big? Protect those to the best of your ability, too.

The process you use for purchase-order/invoice reconciliation, or, as Jimmy John’s notoriously seems to think needs protecting, for making a ham and cheese sandwich?

Uh … no.

As pointed out last week, many business theorists and leaders, for several decades now, have considered employees to be fungible commodities, to be traded into and out of the pool of available talent without compunction or regret.

But when they’re traded, they take their knowledge with them — an apparently unintended consequence of this employment philosophy.

Shared knowledge is at the heart of the Cognitive Enterprise. One consequence of replacing a long-term employee who has a vast fund of institutional knowledge is …

Well, it depends. If the employee’s replacement is quite a lot less experienced, or if there is no replacement, the enterprise’s total shared-knowledge account will have been diminished.

If, on the other hand, the business replaces the departing employee with one who has just as large a fund of institutional knowledge, or larger, only it’s a fund accumulated in different institutions, then the enterprise’s shared-knowledge account will increase.

It’s permeability in action, even without any electronic knowledge sharing. Imagine the company chart of accounts had a way to track shared knowledge. Think its executives might make different staffing decisions?

It would be an intriguing exercise in finance, figuring out how to tote up all of the valuable knowledge held in an organization. The trickiest part wouldn’t be how to put a number on it. Not that this would be easy, understand, but given how many non-disclosure agreements claim that revealing any of it would cause irreparable harm, you’d think someone would know how big a number “irreparable” is, at least approximately.

Not to keep you in suspense, here’s what would be the trickiest part: In a cognitive enterprise, knowledge is widely shared — it’s what the whole organization knows that counts, not just what an individual who works there knows.

Which gets to one of my own trade secrets, which I’m allowed to share with you because it was knowledge I had that preceded my joining Dell Services: No matter what the challenge or issue, there are employees who know all about it and what to do about it. Their problem, and one of my best ways of earning my keep as a consultant, is that until my team and I show up, nobody has any interest in what they have to say.

To be fair, after my teams and I show up and do listen to them, putting it all together into a nice, coherent narrative and plan, very often client leadership doesn’t want to hear it from us, either. It is, I guess, cognition prevention at the highest levels of leadership.

This is also why embracing permeability is a safe knowledge management tactic: If your company’s stuff makes it into, for example, a LinkedIn discussion forum where the employees of other companies read all about it, you have little to worry about.

The odds are long nobody will listen to them after your employees have made them smarter. If you’re smart, you won’t duplicate that mistake.

So stop trying to protect your own IP and learn from all those other folks who are sharing theirs.

Once more thing. If you think this week’s KJR is worth sharing, please do so. Just make sure to respect the copyright notice at the bottom when you do.

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