Sublime

everything had been allowed to drift in a sea of vagueness.

Any employee who is smart will not try to argue with the numbers, because you can’t argue with assumptions which have not been made explicit. But from the moment they hear the objectives, they begin assembling plausible excuses for why they will not achieve them. Finally, since everyone has deliberately kept their personal thoughts, feelings, and a

At my own workplaces, the New Age–speak mingled recklessly with aviation metaphors ( holding pattern, the concept of discussing something at the 30,000-foot level), verbs and adjectives shoved into nounhood ( ask, win, fail, refresh, regroup, creative, sync, touchbase ), nouns shoved into verbhood ( whiteboard, bucket ), and a heap of nonwords that

There was often no clear way of resolving disagreements,

Indeed, on the very first day of the lab there was an outcry over the lack of formal definitions.

because both fear and desire are busy equivocating with each other, with me, I can’t even tell the difference between wanting him to open the door and hoping he’s stood me up.

From critical legal studies, the group borrowed the idea of legal indeterminacy—the idea that not every legal case has one correct outcome. Instead, one can decide most cases either way, by emphasizing one line of authority over another or interpreting one fact differently from the way one’s adversary does. The group also incorporated skepticism of