A few months ago a senior British broker, whom I shall call “Dennis”, staged a tiny personal rebellion. Dennis sits on the board of a company that insures some of the biggest accounts at Lloyd's of London. And in this field, as Dennis tells me, “accurate statistics are vital for the underwriters to assess risk”.
Unfortunately, the computing systems that were supposed to collect this all-important data were plagued by problems. In an effort to fix these woes, Dennis's company duly hired an expert to devise a new, improved (and expensive) system - and called a meeting of the board to approve it.
So far, so unremarkable. But then the tale took an unusual turn. When the computing expert presented his plans, everyone on the board waved them through - except for Dennis, who declared that he would not approve the plans since he had “not understood a word the computer expert had said... [The project] was delivered using the baffling gobbledegook that many computer geeks use,” he explains.