Say Anything Blog

Senator Hillary Clinton is about to unleash a whole new version of herself. Again. This one is going to be a Hillary thinking outside of the box (!), thinking laterally (!!), and using innovation to find the way forward to the path of tomorrow where success isn’t a secret, but a global promise (!!!).

Nothing grates on nerves quite like corporate-speak. It’s the lingo of Type A suits everywhere, proselytizing to the inspirationally challenged while exploiting their own clip-art fetishes. Senator Clinton was thinking synergistically when she hired “serial innovator” John Kao (pronounced “Kao") as part of her senatorial campaign, and paid him $70,000 to show her that with can-do attitude she will flow with jazz magic.

Kao is now on Clinton’s presidential campaign (working pro bono) and his “Innovation Manifesto” is making the rounds in the bullpens.

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The "Innovation Manifesto" is built on "The 20 Statements," which I believe were until now, a secret known only to Mr. Kao, derived from vanished golden tablets buried in his backyard that were only readable through magic glasses sent from God. These incredibly mysterious, deep statements run the gamut from, "Innovation is an expression of an organized culture," to my favorite "Ideation instigates innovation." Apparently, alliterative assholes assume adults appreciate this kind of adolescent absurdity.

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Over all, this “manifesto” uses the word innovation upwards of sixty times, defined by Kao as “creativity applied with intention to create value.” I think that means attempting to co-opt everything that’s great, wring whatever money is possible out of it, and then move on to the next fad like a swarm of well-tailored locusts.

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The whole packet is filled with these empty phrases: statements like "We are in the midst of a profound change from a logic of business based on economies of scale to economies of discovery," which I guess is like the more douchey version of saying that talking about music is now like dancing about architecture. After four pages of this tripe, my head begins to ache. Should you tilt towards towards the masochistic, you can click here [pdf] to read it for yourself.

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“The Innovation Manifesto” reads like the bits that weren’t good enough to get into L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, and since that reads like a barely literate attempt at Bible fan fiction, that’s saying a lot. It’s entirely possible that copies of this lame attempt at “punk” corporate talk, landed in the Clinton staff’s trash cans, but that this sort of faux-inspirational babble has gotten anywhere near a presidential campaign is alarming.