I remember listening to Lee – the ultimate winner – in last year’s UK series of The Apprentice. He was debriefing one of the members of his team and screaming at her “If you don’t perform, you’re out of here. You’ve just got to perform!” Strangely, Lee wouldn’t (or couldn’t) decompose perform into one or more less complex goals to help her see the wood for the trees. ‘Performing’ it seemed, was the only result that mattered, if you couldn’t do it you were out, but he certainly wasn’t going to take the time to explain how to do it. Lee’s behaviour came with a whiff of bullshit because I don’t believe he knew enough about the problem space and its dynamics to be able to help his team member tackle it – he knew what results he wanted (… in this case, he simply wanted to win), but not how to get them – he didn’t have a clue.

I have a worrying suspicion that the same sort of phenomenon is very much alive across the world’s economies today. In today’s business ghetto-speak, people who get results have talent. Pressed into service in the corporate world, talent becomes a ruthless obsession with exceeding short-term targets – usually financial – combined with a disregard for doing what’s right but can’t be diced and sliced into an accountant’s spreadsheet – a disregard for what can’t be measured easily. In 2002, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article for The New Yorker (still online) in which he eloquently questioned this notion of talent - immediately in the wake of the Enron debacle, he wasn’t short of source material. In the words of one former Enron manager commenting as his company hired McKinsey to identify new talent: “They were always around. They were looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box itself that needed fixing.”

Thirty years ago I attended a management training course where it was explained that part of the art of good management was the ability to divide your attention appropriately between three arenas – the group, the task and the individual – with most smarts being awarded when you could do it in just the right proportions for the job at hand.

All this is in the past. So what light can a year-old UK TV reality show, a New Yorker article from 2002 and a fossilised management training course shine upon the global economic crisis? No doubt the people who came up with the idea of securitising bad debts were regarded as talented. No doubt even, that the people who took bundles of bad debts and securitised the bundles themselves were thought to be talented. And the evidence shows that the short–term results were impressive – that these people performed. There’s nothing wrong, they say, with packaging up  heterogeneous home mortgages into uniform securities that can be exchanged and loaned by banks. But however much you stir it, a bucket of shit is still a bucket of shit.  The evidence also indicates – although the jury is still out – that many of the very senior decision makers hadn’t a clue what was inside the poison pills their subordinates were so productively concocting. They were like Lee in The Apprentice – they knew what results they wanted, but didn’t know (or didn’t care) how they were achieved. They were blind to everything except their aspirations as individuals within their intoxicating corporate cultures. Well, the whole world has come to care how those results were achieved, because by winning, a high-priesthood elite of financial goons and technocrats has set the global economy back for at least a decade. Talent. What a waste of a word.

The world’s box needs fixing.