John MacFarlane is the chairman of Barclays Bank.  He recently deposed his CEO, a man called Antony Jenkins, and temporarily promoted himself, on the grounds that “a new set of skills were required for the period ahead”.

The weasle phrase “new skillset (“or ‘skill set’ – no one seems able to decide”) first cropped up in psychology journals in the 1970s and was taken up by the business school crowd, ever ready for a new bit of jargon.  It doesn’t mean much but is used throughout industry and especially in jobs where the skills needed are vague.   Engineers and electricians have skills; managers and leaders have skill sets.

Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times, (she is the chief reason for reading the paper; she torments the pompous and laughs at the self-important) commented at the time , “In real life, skills do not come in sets. The ability to run a bank depends on ‘things that are not skills at all, but a mishmash of experience and aspects of personality’.   No, if Barclays is honest, the only skill Jenkins lacked was the skill to win the support of the chairman – who is not called ‘Mac the Knife’ for nothing”.

It got me thinking about jargon and “trade speak” and the dismal idea of taking Business Studies as a first degree.  Unless you are a specialist technical person (an engineer or computer techie) business is just common sense.  You can’t learn it in the classroom, but what you can learn is a load of meaningless jargon. The way of  learning about business is to do it the hard way, that is, do it and get some solid experience behind you.  Were I back running a business I would look first for people who were good with people, whether customers or staff.  Degrees in business are useless unless you have a natural way with your fellow human beings.  The technicalities are easy to learn by comparison. As Lucy Kellaway points out, in big companies a facility with company politics is the thing.  Perfectly Epicurean – the art of getting on well with people and making life as pleasant as possible.