Militate and mitigate, authentic and disintermediate

The 16th instalment of Words of the Week, my glossary of poor language usage

Militate and mitigate

Militate does not mean mitigate and mitigate does not mean militate. To mitigate something is to lessen its impact; to militate against something is to make that thing more difficult. It does not make sense to mitigate against anything. It’s an easy one to get wrong. William Faulkner did so in his 1931 short story, Centaur in Brass: “Some intangible and invisible social force that mitigates against him”.

Authentic

A borrowing from existential philosophy which repetition has now wearied. In the philosophical literature, authenticity has the precise sense of knowing oneself and being in control of one’s life. Transposed to the arena of business, though, authenticity has a bewildering range of meanings. The term “authentic” is applied to leadership that is stimulating and inspiring, to a successful method of motivating others, to a leader who is aware of his or her own strengths and weaknesses and to one who is true to who they are, whatever that may be. When “authentic” is applied to a brand the idea becomes even more vaguely capacious. Among its legions of meanings “authentic” can mean redeeming a promise, treating customers with respect, ensuring the quality of products, protecting the privacy of customers, acting with integrity, being open emotionally, inviting critical viewpoints, the upshot of trigger events in an autobiography, defining a business purpose beyond profit, being genuine and holding true to your values. Clearly these are all virtues but all of them are quite specific and separate things. Our understanding of none of them is added to by calling them “authentic”, nor do they add up to something called “authentic leadership”. All that has happened here is that some business guru has gathered all the usual positive epithets and given it a needless label. Authenticity has been in vogue in the business world since Bill George published Authentic Leadership in 2003 and then his 2007 follow-up True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership.

It is a slippery idea whose deficiencies are obvious. Who really knows their true self? It’s rather a troubling question and not necessarily one that bears too closely on the task of, for example, running an online price comparison site. Good leadership in fact requires a set of attributes that we can specify such as clarity, intelligence and rigour. If your true self includes these attributes then all well and good, your authentic self will coincide with someone who is likely to be a good leader. But if your authentic self is not like this then you are going to have to change. Stubbornly sticking to authentic methods that don’t work might be authentic but it is also stupid. It is hard to shake off the suspicion that most people are using the word “authentic” to mean simply “good at leadership”. The term is therefore explaining nothing.

If you must use the idea of authenticity do not stretch the meaning too far. The measure of authenticity is simple. The authentic leaders lives up to her words. The brand redeems its promise. It does what it says on the tin. Bear in mind too that we do not want all leaders to be authentic. They might be authentically awful. The best way to cure yourself of excessive use of the word “authentic” is to remind yourself of all the appalling tyrants, in business and politics, who governed authentically, as themselves. That is always the problem.

Disintermediate

This is a road crash pile-up which seems to be assembled from the wreckage of broken words. Reoverformulate. Desuprapostulate. This is also one of those words which sounds precise but isn’t. Your audience will hear different meanings and you can avoid the confusion by saying what you actually mean. Disintermediate was first used in banking in 1967 and all it meant was cutting out the middle-man. When Peter Kern, former CEO of Expedia, said “Google tried to disintermediate us” he means that Google tried to kill his business by making it unnecessary, like water pipes disintermediating the walk to a well with a bucket.