None of us is as blue as all of us.

Or, "None of us is as smart as all of us."

Having been trained in logic as a student of philosophy, I could not let go of the allure of analysing this statement just for the heck of it. It has been insurreptitiously posted at my place of work for many a month now, and if it hasn't seen light of day at yours, consider yourself lucky yet.

Of course, this is management's way of saying: Work as a team. Knock your brains together. Be a self-respecting cog in this magnificent opus of our enterprise. Our sum is greater than our parts. 1 + 1 > 2, etc. Well, it might not have been meant that way. For sure, management's solutions to its problems span such organisational gung-ho pronouncements that also serve to tickle the philosophically ticklish among us hierarchically-challenged types.

For one, how could one argue with this tautology? — Not one of us is as smart as all of us. — Take the existential quantifier (one), deny it (not one), then predicate the universal quantifier (all) to the just denied existential? Nothing new is being said here, because the meaning of the terms makes the statement true by its logical form alone. The negation in the subject has the same effect as the negation in the copula and has the same effect as the negation of the predicate. Consequently, one can say "None of us is as tall as all of us" and leave no doubt about one's meaning. One can substitute 'old', 'blue', 'wooden' or 'crazy' in the predicate and still not lose one's meaning. The form of the proposition already guarantees that you come up with the analytic statement. Put simply, it does not add to our knowledge. There is also no precipice of incredulity to climb. We already know when the statement will result in a tautology or a contradiction.

What makes this statement pernicious however is the way it seduces us to assent nonchalantly to its premise of matter-of-factness. It certainly is not easy to contradict the statement by uttering, "One of us is as smart as all of us!", for that can not be found in fact at all. But neither is the statement it was uttered to contradict based on any form of reality. Show me, one should ask, show me your factual basis for not finding one of us who is as smart, tall, or handsome as all of us. [Women may or in fact may not show good sense in the belief that such a one could be found at all, else why be bothered to settle for one of us not as smart, as tall, or as handsome as all of us?] The truth is, the utterance of such unverifiable inanity is a danger to the unguarded hearths of our thinking. Through the backdoor of lackadaisical habits of mind, we have come to accept or ignore silly ideas from managers with nary a word or thought of intelligent contest. None of us is as smart as all of us because maybe they intend to keep it that way. Exeunt a healthy scepticism; enter hype, quick fixes, surrender of consciousness. The bogus agent provocateur of snappy management ideas has overstayed its welcome and must be excreted, pushed away, pulled out, whatever it takes to purge our understanding of its tentacles of seductively masquerading truths.

So, such a statement is un-scientific. Not only is it analytically impoverished, we are also not enriched by its empirical diktat. It could not be falsified in our experience of the past, and it lacks the quality of falsifiability in the future. No physical, social or neuroscientific experiment could be set up to prove otherwise what the statement assumes to be a truism. Yet it lives in management's thinking as a mantra: make it so, make it so, make it so! No doubt, such management cheesiness fails to deliver what sensible team-building policies, practices and behaviours will. For all they are worth, should not managerial pronouncements be limited to fact-based memoranda, formulations of business strategy, or clarifications of policy? They should definitely steer clear of darling nostrums that can not be resourced, costed, delivered and measured. And, not without irony, management's credibility as both proponent and opponent of ideas need not be boosted or tarnished by excursions into agendas that have little or nothing to do with actionable and measurable items of business. For what is created and destroyed in the corner office must be subjected to a kind of impairment test.

Posit, in the end, that the 'none of us' statement is false and meaningless. Easily done. Or consider the possibility that the 'all of us' predicate is just a group of one. Quite possible in fact. Or consider the mine-is-a-greater-tragedy-than-all-of-yours stories at group therapy. Sympathetically pitiful, and one that says one of us has been more of a been-there-done-that than all of us combined. But also consider the absolute and relative value of smartness, tallness, etc. What is this welter of "values" we have to measure up to? Even within its own context, that of team-building, the argument's implications for excellence are palpably de-motivating. Such posture runs counter to superlative achievements of canonical aggregators (Aristotle), risk-takers (Nietzsche), geniuses (Shakespeare), investors (Warren Buffett), strategists (Sun Tzu), and, why not, corner store gossips, whose prowess at churning second-hand lies surpasses everybody else's ability to digest them. This anti-thesis to greatness and notoriety, proletarian thinking, did not last the test of time, not during the age of dinosaurs, and not during the time of human history. On the flip-side, management is not only foolish to manage excellence expectations downwards but also positively nincompoopish to give prominence of message to such patently ridiculous expectations of employees getting smarter than everyone else put together. Not only do the carrot of mediocrity but also the stick of conformity become management's preferred methods of providing incentives. And to what end? To prove that the impossible notion actually does not work? The tower of none of us must collapse gratuitously if not for the fact that it is touted by seemingly well-meaning one-of-uses.

One's ability to be removed from the box in which he or she is placed is the single most compelling reason for progress. To see, with the vision thing, to articulate, harness, transform, make alive what once was inanimate are the latitudes of smartness. It needs room to grow, and gladly waits for nobody. And nope, not for everybody either.

Twenty-first century managers should ceremoniously inter the bones of none of us so that all of us, diversity in the flesh and blood, eyes of all hues, tongues of cultures everywhere, can work unceremoniously. Who knows, one day one of us might be smarter than all of us. What a ceremony it is going to be.