Meritocrazy
For all its flaws, the British system at least provides equal opportunities for everyone to make a fool of themselves regardless of origin.
As far as online meetings go, there is little I can tell you that most of you don’t know already.
There’s always someone who forgets to mute themselves and you hear them whisper in the background, usually about non-work related stuff like picking up the kids from school or deciding what they are cooking for dinner and which groceries they need to get later on.
There’s that one person who forgets they’re on camera when they shouldn’t and you need to let them know -ideally subtly and via private message- that everyone can see them excavate the depths of their nostrils with a focus worthy of a seasoned speolologist.
There are usually several people discussing the proceedings of the main meeting with other colleagues in a parallel meeting rolling their eyes at the exact same points and which constitutes the backbone on which office alliances and friendships are forged.
And there is of course always someone who is new and is forced, whether they want it or not, to go through a round of never-ending intros.
Lawrence, bless his double-barrelled surname and remarkable skin complexion for someone in his 50s, is new to the organisation. More specifically, he is the Director of Talent, Skills and People Development, which makes of him a member of the senior leadership team by virtue of job title and and one of the top six breadwinners in the company courtesy of the salary that goes with it.
If we were in Southern Europe, we wouldn’t know his name much less see his face until he was approaching retirement and we needed to confirm whether we’d be attending the ‘surprise’ farewell party. That is because in Southern Europe you’re far more likely to be acknowledged and celebrated when you’re leaving a company than when you’re part of it, which tells you everything you need to know about how things work and why so many of us rejected such promising career prospects.
Luckily for Lawerence we find ourselves closer to the frozen winds of the Artic than to the balmy Mediterranean breeze, which means people are always given their moment to shine, whether they want it or not. In fact, as a result of all the other senior directors being away either on annual leave or on business trips, the spotlight has been turned on Lawrence sooner than he may have wished.
Apart from where the toilets are and how the coffee machine works, I doubt he has had time to familiarise with much else in the short time he’s been with us. However, in a classic move reflective of British leadership style, Lawrence has been tasked with hosting a meeting he’s never attended previously to discuss topics outside his immediate area of expertise and in which there are 230 people spread across several time zones, of whom at most he’s met 20 being generous.
Unfortunately, or rather luckily depending on how you look at it, there is no time for introductions today as Lawrence has a tight agenda to go through during the next hour and which is peppered with acronyms that are confusing to the most seasoned among us and, I presume, utterly indecipherable for him judging by how he’s looking at the screen with the expression of someone who is trying to remember which past sin he’s atoning for while he mutters in a clear RP English “What the actual fuck does IDGF even mean?” and which in true British manner we all do our best to pretend we haven’t heard.
Despite this slightly disconcerting start, I have faith in Lawrence.
He is, after all, a senior director and one doesn’t land a job that puts you at the top of the taxpayer pyramid without having done something to deserve it. Besides, when has been a little linguistic hurdle an impediment for a British person to carry on hoping others will understand if only he speaks loudly and slowly enough?
“Right, er… so today we have… uhm, quite the agenda, it seems,” Lawrence manages to say among a surprising amount of facial twitching. “Let’s… uhm, let’s get cracking, shall we? I think the first point today is, and please excuse me if I am getting this wrong but it says here IDGF. Is that correct?” the disbelief in his voice is obvious as he tries to confirm we use this acronym in a professional setting and not something we’ve just made up to test him. “Are we, er, actually allowed to use, excuse me again, IDGF in a work context?”
I have always admired and envied the ability British people have to be effortlessly resourceful, witty, and eloquent at anything that requires a level of public performance. Lawrence, I can see now, is the exception to that rule.
Jim, the colleague presenting on that point, unmutes himself and clarifies in a good-humoured tone that IDGF, despite what it may seem, actually stands for “International and Domestic Growth Forecast” to refer to projects completing in the next 18 months. Lawrence seems puzzled we use an acronym that can be so easily misconstrued for an expression denoting a strong lack of interest in any business, whether international, domestic, or our own.
Which is probably how Lawrence feels listening to Jim speak for the next ten minutes in a series of acronyms for which no additional explanation is offered. While Lawrence’s face remains mostly straight, his eyebrows have engaged in a frantic eye gymnastics routine that could win Simone Biles another Olympic medal and which seems to have been triggered by the increased used of cryptic words. Keyboards across the globe must be fuming as I bet the parallel meeting brigade is as fascinated as I am with Lawrence’s hypnotic eyebrow game.
The next point in the agenda is introduced and it contains yet another acronym but since we’re all familiar with it, the colleague now speaking doesn’t elaborate on what it stands for.
Lawrence has now morphed into a modern Champollion trying his best to decipher the inscriptions of the Rosetta stone that is this meeting with nothing but the AOB1 to go with. His face is contorting in ways I doubt the most experienced members of the Cirque du Soleil are able to pull off without tearing a muscle. It’s quite impressive to witness although I don’t know what to make of it. What if he’s having a stroke while we’re casually debating in the parallel chat whether his superb skin it’s only the product of extreme facial yoga or there’s been any subtle chemical enhancements?
To be fair it’s not easy to look composed while absorbing information that must be all Greek to him while being closely observed by hundreds of strangers around the world, who are judging not only his enviable skincare routine but also which merits have landed someone who clearly belongs in a cottage in the Cotswolds a job where seeing IDGF as an agenda point almost causes him an aneurysm.
Another things we can tell immediately is that Lawrence is not very well versed in online meetings etiquette as he is oblivious to the fact he should turn off his camera if he doesn’t want us to see him curse internally while his eyebrows do it externally. His facial twerking skills are truly unlike anything I’ve seen before. Maybe he’s doing it on purpose to show us it’s all natural? That supple skin tone at 50 doesn’t happen on its own but by the heights the eyebrows reach so effortlessly, almost merging with his well-defined hairline, it’s clear he doesn’t do Botox.
Half an hour into the meeting, we arrive to the point on the agenda where any new starters are asked to introduce themselves. Lawrence, visibly exhausted by the proceedings by now, erupts in a soliloquy that catches us off guard as up until now he has delegated most of the talking to his facial features.
“And now… er… right, new starters. Good stuff. So as you may know I’m quite new myself and, er, I’d like to ask everyone to be patient with new joiners as it can be, well, you know, a bit overwhelming at the beginning.” He has taken off his glasses, his left index and thumb gently rubbing the bridge of his nose where the glasses were resting a few seconds ago. He takes his head slightly back, closing his eyes and pursing his lips a few times as if to prove he’s not a one-trick eyebrow pony.
“It’s kind of, er, challenging, when you join a new place and you haven’t even got time to learn the lingo, I mean, business terms you are all so familiar with and clearly love to use so very much,” he says still with his eyes closed and head back. A silence follows. Then, after a few seconds, as if he had suddenly remembered he’s in a meeting, he erects himself on the chair, puts on his glasses, and resumes speaking in his clear Downton Abbey voice.
“Right, er, well, I trust you all have been through it before and know how to, yes, uhm, just you know, speak in a way we can all understand as it’s a learning curve for many of us. Anyway, over to our new joiners. Can you please introduce yourselves?.”
As soon as the first new joiner mentions her previous role was at “UKTBD, which I’m sure you’re all familiar with”, we see Lawrence’s mouth slowly contour to form the words “Jesus fucking Christ.” Because he has forgotten to mute himself, we also hear them loud and clear a millisecond later, like a thunder following the lightning.
If you asked me to pick someone on the spot who’d rather have a rabid dog lick their testicles than be in this meeting a minute longer, my money would be on Lawrence. From this side of the screen his facial expression presents a significant overlap with that of someone having a mental breakdown and I can only sympathise.
By virtue of his senior job title (and six figure salary, let’s not forget) this is probably the kind of extra responsibilities bestowed upon him on top of his main duties as Director of Talent, Skills and People Development, which for all I know could be limited to being able to contort his face into 50 different facial expressions per hour.
That’s the problem with job titles: they hardly reflect someone’s real strengths and what they’re good at and therefore many people are often professionally mismatched and undervalued, their true talents buried under a pile of meaningless job functions and acronyms they’re forced to learn as a business lingua franca to communicate with colleagues whose job titles are equally cryptic about their actual skills. For instance, perhaps it’s about time that Senior Finance Manager rebranded as I’ll give you hell if you forget to add as much as a comma when you claim business expenses, which immediately offers an invaluable insight into the miserable life that person must lead outside of work to find solace in such an awful role.
With the meeting approaching its end and less than two minutes to log off, Lawrence’s face relaxed into the closest he’s been in the past 58 minutes to something close to relief. For the past hour we have witnessed an individual who regretted the moment he came into the world and followed a path that led him to being in charge of today’s meeting. Now, for the first time, his features seem to be spontaneously arranging themselves into a smile. Although after the extraordinary facial showcase of the past hour this may as well be expression number 48 kicking in.
“So, thanks everyone for joining today, er, hope that was a useful meeting and that next month you won’t have to put up with me again. Take care everyone, bye now.”
Before we have time to unmute ourselves and proceed to chant an echo of “byes” and “thanks,” Lawrence has vanished, his remarkably flexible visage swallowed up by the black hole of the screen, probably to never be seen again if he can avoid it.
As I have twenty minutes before my next online meeting, I decide to make a coffee and catch up with the news. There is something I can’t quite put my finger on about Lawrence and his mesmerising facial expressions, but my attention is immediately diverted to a strange headline the moment I open the website of a national newspaper.
It seems Kemi Badenoch has promised, should the Conservatives reach power under her strong and stable2 guidance, to cap the number of “rip off” university degrees such as English. I would be interested in knowing whether this great idea came to her before or after people from her own party managed to misspelled Britain in some the merchandising they were selling at the Conservative conference. Not that it would make any difference.
It is the utter absurdity of this headline that makes me finally realise what has been bugging me all along about Lawrence’s superb facial performance.
Much has been said about how meritocracy is a myth in the UK, a country ruled deep down by the unbreakable bonds forged within the privilege of class, the connections one makes as a result of their station in life at birth and who will secure a prosperous career path, whichever professional route one chooses to follow, and oftentimes irrespective of skill or merit. Cynics would say that meritocracy in this day and age is an empty shell as the word has been devoid of its meaning over time, condemned to become a verbal fossil, trapped in the pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica like a prehistoric insect in amber.
However, if one pays close attention, meritocracy is a word often misused to hide a much more disturbing truth and it’s quite sad most of us have become so emotionally numb as to not be able to recognise it even when it’s right in front of our eyes. It really breaks my heart to witness how so many people are forced to waste their potential and lead unfilled lives in positions of power only because they have been born in the wrong circumstances when it is obvious their true talents will be much more valued in a circus. Ideally as clowns.
You will think I’m too naive for believing that being born into riches and privilege should not prevent, say, a young man born in this country from immigrant parents from being able to earn an honest living busking at Tottenham Court Road during rush hour while everyone ignores him at best and wishes he had chosen Bank at worst.
Unfortunately for many people life has been predetermined before they were even born. Life for them will be at best an uphill struggle and at worst a lost battle against a rigged system designed for the few, not the many.
In the case of our hypothetical young man who dreams of nothing else but tormenting commuters at 8 am on a Wednesday with his rendition of Sultans of Swing (lyrics and all), by virtue of his birth he will be unfairly pushed to study PPE at Oxbridge, work as an analyst at an investment bank, join a political party after a while, possibly even do a short stint as PM of his country, and then end his days as a senior advisor to a multibillion tech business, a role is not far-fetched to think he may have secured as a result of being in a series of highly influential positions throughout his life.
Now you tell me if someone whose dreams have been crushed so cruelly by something as arbitrary as how they came into the world can believe in a word like meritocracy at all. To which I add in this economy and in the age of nepo babies.
And yet, for all its flaws, the British system at least provides equal opportunities for everyone to make a fool of themselves regardless of their origin. It’s an embarrassment of riches. Name other country allows this level of personal and public ridicule at such level of seniority without consequence3. You can argue this diverges from the intended original meaning of meritocracy but you can’t deny these people have fought hard, sometimes to unthinkable extremes, to be seen as the most highly incompetent among their peers.
To see so many people in politics waste their potential trying to be taken seriously when deep inside there’s a stand-up comedian desperate to join an open mic night is truly heartbreaking.
In fact, given the extraordinary capacity that the English language has to coin new words and build on existing ones with a simple tweak, I would like to suggest that we start using a new term to raise awareness about the real victims of the class system and its shortcomings before Kemi Badenoch removes English from the higher education curriculum altogether.
Meritocrazy.
As for its definition, I propose “the government or the holding of power by people selected by their high tolerance for ridicule, capacity for publicly making fools of themselves without blinking and whose skills are far more relevant and appreciated as a Jet2Holiday resort entertainer in Tenerife in low season than in any decision-making setting.”
I’d go even further and advocate for meritocrazy to be chosen as the Oxford English Dictionary word of the year in 2025 as many people have gone truly above and beyond to make extraordinary merits -perhaps the only time in their lives they’ve applied themselves with such dedication to a task- to outdo their peers, at home and abroad, to put the word on the map of global politics.
Or in the case of poor Lawrence on a meeting he would have rather never been part of no matter his privileged taxpayer status.
I wouldn’t be surprised if after being forced to take part in such traumatic event, we received an email in the the next few days informing us that Lawrence has finally got around using IDGF at work and is leaving in order to pursuit other opportunities more aligned with his personal interests.
I sincerely hope that is the case and that he has the courage to follow his dreams.
I’m positive our loss will be the Cirque du Soleil’s win for Lawrence is the most outstanding facial contortionist I’ve ever seen in my life and while competition to join the team will be fierce, I have no doubt this is a role he’ll land on his own excellent merits.
Abroad is an independent publication about London, living in between cultures, creativity, and being human in the age of artificial intelligence.
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Any Other Business in the usual office lingo many of us have to be fluent in.
Theresa May’s favourite slogan, which could be said more convincingly to describe Lawrence’s facial architecture than political leadership in the UK.
Ok, fine, pretty much anywhere else in the world right now but the point still stands.
This was fantastic to read on a monday morning, a fresh cup of instant coffee in hand, sitting at my desk in the office.
Que chismosa eres Cristina! I was already laughing so hard just at this guy’s title and it got better after that even