Clive was the marketing manager of a large travel agency. In his mid-40s, with three children and a mortgage, Clive was an unremarkable but perfectly sound performer. He prided himself on being an original thinker, and was a menace when working with marketing agencies because he used to feel obliged to produce the last idea and was forever changing his mind, usually after a critical deadline had just passed.

Clive worked at the company’s headquarters alongside other managers all heading up central functions. Clive hadn’t always been in the travel business, having held a variety of jobs in different sectors. However, marketing had been his passion from college days onwards. If there is a stereotype of a marketing man, Clive was it. He radiated faith along the lines of ‘it’s not the sausage we sell, it’s the sizzle’.

Now, as you might guess from the mention of sausages and sizzle, Clive was very fond of catch-phrases and clichés. He frequently made remarks such as:

‘Let’s get to where the rubber hits the road.’

‘That’s about as useful as tits on a bull.’

‘No rest for the wicked.’

‘What you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts.’

‘His bark is worse than his bite.’

‘We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.’

‘It’s all water under the bridge.’

‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’

‘We’re on a hiding to nothing.’

‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat.’

And so on. Clive appeared to be oblivious of his addiction to clichéspeak. Even when people made fun of him by mimicking his clichés, Clive didn’t seem to notice. One had to conclude that it was all happening at some deep, unconscious level.

In addition to using clichés on a daily basis, Clive would also develop a fondness for a particular catch-phrase that would last for two or three weeks before fading away to be replaced by another. For example, at a time when Clive had ‘discovered’ systems thinking, he drove his colleagues to distraction by frequently uttering meaningfully, ‘It beats as it sweeps as it cleans.’ While it lasted, it was extraordinary how many things Clive perceived as total inter-linked integrated systems.

Another example was when Clive realised that there were few absolutes and that just about everything was relative and open to differing interpretations. While in the grip of this not insignificant insight, Clive used to go round saying ‘There’s no perception without contrast.’ Yet another example was when Clive returned from holiday with a T-shirt displaying on the front, ‘When all is said and done...’ and on the back,’... far more is said than done.’ For many weeks Clive used to say this as he emerged from yet another management meeting.

One day Clive was serving on a selection panel charged with the task of recruiting an advertising manager. Naturally, creativity featured high on the list of competencies in the person specification and the panel was at pains to assess this attribute with each of the five shortlisted candidates.

During the review session at the end of the day, Clive opened the proceedings by saying ‘We are here to sort the wheat from the chaff –but I fear all we have is chaff.’ His colleagues asked him to be more explicit and were astonished to hear him express the view that all the candidates had been ‘too ordinary’.

When challenged to substantiate this claim, Clive said he’d failed to detect sufficient original thinking and, in particular, had been disappointed by the number of hackneyed phrases they had all employed!