I always hesitate before starting out a sentence with the “There are two types of people in the world . . .” line, because in my head, I always complete it with “. . .

people who divide the world into two types of people, and people who don’t.” Getting past that little difficulty, though, there can be some value in classifying people that way, as long as it makes you look for particularly revealing fault lines.

And I think I have one. Try dividing up the world like this: into people who believe that putting names on things is very important, and people who really don’t care that much. This may sound odd at first, or trivial, but bear with me. Think about the last time some big HR craze swept across your company, for example. I have in mind one of those Big Deals that comes with its own posters, slogans, newsletters — you know the stuff. It had a name, didn’t it? There was an overarching name for the whole campaign. If you can stand it, look over some of that waste paper closely, and you’ll see that the people who put it together spent a lot of time thinking about those acronyms and tag lines. They gave all the steps of the new Wonder Process names, because that was somehow a crucial step. For that matter, they probably numbered them, too, which is another version of the same kind of thinking. Whenever I hear someone talk about taking something abstract  “to the next level,” I find myself wondering just how these levels get decided on, and who decides when something has “moved up a notch.”

Some of thinking behind these names is just marketing, of course. To pick — and pick on — a well-known example, the repeated snick-snick in the phrase “Six Sigma” makes it sound sleek and efficient in a way that the other numbers just can’t quite manage, and statistics be damned. Catchy, memorable names are understandable if you’re trying to sell something, and those HR programs are very much an example of people trying to sell something. Now, this doesn’t always work out as planned — I remember one of these campaigns that was billed as “No More Business As Usual!”, and it was undermined by the insertion of a comma after the No.

Successful or not, I can’t really blame them for that sort of naming, but there’s something else at work, too. When a technology company puts up a new building, they don’t just name it “Building 14” or something. No, it’s the “Innovation Center,” or the “Discovery Zone.” Now, for those same marketing reasons I wouldn’t expect them to call it Futility Hall, any more than I’d look for a new fast-food chain called Moldy’s. I’m fine with that. But they aren’t picking just some neutral term, they’re going over to the positive-effect side.

Somehow, using these words is supposed to make the actual thing appear. Apparently, if you’re working in the Creativity Complex, you’re going to find yourself unable to help becoming more creative. The resemblance to medieval magic spells is hard to get out of your mind once it occurs to you, as is the thought of all the great discoveries of the past that were made in buildings that made no reference to how wonderful they were. It’s hard to imagine Isaac Newton striding into a building marked “Innovation Center,” since someone like that turns whatever building he’s in into one by default.

But you get the purest form of this in corporate mission statements and corporate anthems. “I feel your pain,” as another fellow Arkansan used to say, if you work in a place that has devoted time and effort to either of these. I well recall a harrowing meeting where I found out that my company at the time had paid some outfit to whip up a song to inspire us all. I was inspired . . . to stuff my ears with foam from the chair cushion, personally. The song was all about teams and dreams, missions and visions, and I would pay cash, even to this day, to get it out of my head. As we lurched out of the conference room, a colleague of mine with an even more sour attitude than I have said that he would have much preferred Highway to Hell if we were going to have a company song, and that it was a lot more accurate, anyway. Mission statements are a less tuneful version of the same — actually, come to think of it, if you can set a typical mission statement to any kind of melody, you’re seriously in the wrong field.

Everything in a typical mission statement is just so darn value-driven and focused, just soaking in so much excellence and commitment. You know how it sounds (there were so many hands on it along the way that it couldn’t sound any other way); you knew how it was going to sound before the whole process of statement-writing even started. So why write it? This question baffled me until I figured that the missing piece was as stated above. It wasn’t that there was some component of the thing that I was missing, it was that people attached very different values to the components that I was already seeing. Somehow, having this stuff written down, posted on the wall (or sung by a sincere-looking multi-ethnic chorus) made it more real for some people, and turned the slogans into actual results.

That’s the difference between those two varieties of people, I believe. For me, or for my type, a milk container is not milk. Even less of a substitute is a poster with the word “milk” printed on it, and I find that the quality of the paper stock and the jazziness of the typeface don’t make up the difference too well in a recipe. But then, I’m a scientist, and I know from experience that it doesn’t matter what I think about my compounds, or what my hopes are for them, much less what I call them or how innovative I might be — or claim to be — while I make them. My hash gets settled by a bunch of cells in plates, or rodents in cages, and in neither case can I appeal to their better natures.

So maybe that’s the real difference between the types — one of them primarily spends time trying to get people to do what they think should be done, by impressing them, getting them enthusiastic, appealing to them somehow. And the other type is judged by a less persuadable panel — Wistar rats, I’ve found, are not all that impressed by the color schemes in my presentations. If your whole career is based, though, on what you can do to make other people see things your way and do the things you want, then perhaps it’s natural that you see the world as subject to persuasion, too. Slogans and posters would start to seem more real, more capable of altering the way things are, if you were used to having to do such alterations all the time. CP