"{1818 H Street} is a big, new, faceless rectangular building, of the sort that suddenly shrivels up your curiosity, and leaves you positively anxious not to know what happens inside... There is a frigid sense of future to the building -- that icy supra-national future when wastrels will not be welcomed and prodigals not easily forgiven... There is nothing escapist about the World Bank. It was born in solemnity, and it works with a deliberate purpose to a well-defined and scrupulously honoured set of rules.... Many of its staff members, who are nearly all men, are boring to a degree... They may be excited by the unfolding of history all around them, but do not often let it show." {Morris, The World Bank, 1963}
This is a great passage, written before half of Bank staff were born, but holds up suprisingly well 48 years later. And there are still those who criticize the World Bank for being nothing but a bunch of boring economists. This is a bit unfair. We also have plenty of boring engineers, procurement specialists, anthropologists, financial analysts, and accountants.
Are we boring? Consider the facts...
We (well the majority of us anyways) do essentially three things: emails, meetings, and travel. We spend more than half of our working hours composing, reading, ignoring, or deleting emails. The other half of the time is spent in tedious meetings where everybody feels obligated to say at least one thing (whether it is important or not) to make the meeting feel worthwhile. We indulge in creating powerpoint presentations featuring such revelations as "stakeholder participation is critical", "must strengthen institutions" and (my personal favourite), "there is no silver bullet!". Then we spend our lunch hours munching on boxed sandwich-cookie-apple combos and watching equally tedious powerpoints supplied by our colleagues.
We communicate poorly. Every sentence includes an acronym, which we don't bother to explain to outsiders or newcomers. We're fond of euphemisms: trips are "missions", agreements are "non-objections", and corruption is "rent-seeking". Our Staff Forum website has fallen totally silent since the Wolfowitz affair (was that all we had to talk about?). Any interesting conversations take place via Instant Messaging or hunched over our trays in the MC cafeteria, swapping secrets and gossip. We are all self-critical of our institution, which is a healthy thing, but this criticism must be kept quiet, which is not a healthy thing. Poking fun at ourselves is not in line with the noble pursuit of poverty reduction, and must be kept private, or left to the shadowy cowards over at Bank Swirled.
On mission, we work until late at night -- no time for fun. There is always one more email; the urge to replicate is paramount. Before leaving for DC, we draft an Aide Memoire, an antiseptic memento of our trip.
Our fashion sense -- and here I'm talking about the guys -- is rather sad. We favour dark suits with inconspicuous ties, without really knowing why. Women do better, to be sure, but most err on the conservative side, leaving the African pagnes and Indian saris at home. It takes an email from HR in June to tell us that it's now OK to convert to "casual dress", whereupon the more adventurous drop the tie...hehehe
So yes, it is easy to conclude that the Bank is rather boring.
But I confess there is a problem with this argument. Bank staff are truly intrepid. We work in dangerous places, falling sick with all sorts of interesting tropical diseases, and occasionally risking our lives. In jungles and slums, we see exotic and dismal places tourists would never get to (and when we do see touristic places, they inevitably seem a bit dull).
The happiest of us have lives outside work. Some have started NGOs for orphans and AIDS patients. We are accomplished actors and dancers and singers. There is some IFC guy with cancer, just back from skiing to the South Pole, for heaven's sake.
When required, staff can rise to truly remarkable levels. My two personal heros are former Staff Association Chairs, who faced off against their respective presidents, at the risk of their careers and immense cost to their families, and prevailed for the benefit of us all.
In that light, how can such a collection of interesting individuals be so boring collectively? Is the Bank less than the sum of its staff?
What do you think?
