There seems to be an obsession with the length of thought leadership today, to the point where it’s tempting to conclude that publishers see it as a panacea for all thought leadership ills. As if to reinforce the point this seems to work both ways–longer and shorter–but overwhelmingly the trend is to pander to notions of a time-starved senior executive and create bite-sized material. It also sounds perfectly sensible.

Along with terrible haircuts, padded shoulders, and beige, French post-structuralist critical theory was really big in the 1980s. Much of what was written about it (post-structuralism, not the 1980s or beige) was so impenetrable that you could win serious kudos for having managed to read a chapter of Jacques Derrida without having a nervous breakdown.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9