Indra Nooyi, the president and CFO of PepsiCo, got in trouble the other day for a speech she made to the graduating students at Columbia Business School, because in that speech she compared the United States to a middle finger. I agree that she should be in trouble, not because the message was offensive to the United States, but because it was one of the most inane speeches I've ever heard of.
The unifying element of the speech was an analogy relating the fingers of a hand to the five "major" continents. (To be fair, Nooyi apologized to Australia and Antarctica for leaving them out. But, as she said “humans have only five fingers on each hand, so my analogy doesn’t work with seven continents.”) Africa, you see, is the little finger, because while it "has yet to catch up with her sister continents" (the way the little finger eventually catches up with the others?), when it hurts "it affects the whole hand." Okay.
Nooyi continued that Asia is the thumb, Europe the pointer finger, the "cradle of democracy [that] pointed the way for western civilization" (to mix a metaphor). The ring finger is "South America, including Latin America," even though a quick glance at a dictionary reveals that Latin America includes South America, not the other way around.
North America -- meaning of course the United States, not Canada -- is the “long, middle finger.” It "really stands out." It "anchors every function that the hand performs and is the key to all of the fingers working together efficiently and effectively." Really? "This [sic] is a really good thing, and has given the U.S. a leg-up [oops] in global business since the end of World War I." But "if used inappropriately -- just like the U.S. -- the middle finger can convey a negative message and get us in trouble." "Each of us in the U.S. -- the long middle finger -- must be careful that when we [sic] extend our arm [sic] in either a business or political sense, we take pains to assure we are giving a hand... not the finger."
Wow. If I saw this sort of nonsense from a college student I'd be aghast. That it's a major speech from the president of a big corporation is genuinely shocking. No part of the analogy really works. Nooyi strains with it later in the speech -- "I'd challenge each of you to think about how critically important it is for every finger on your hand to rise and bend together" -- but it never really gets any better. “You cannot simply ‘allow’ the other four fingers to rise only when you want them to [huh?]. If you’ve ever even tried to do that, you know how clumsy and uncoordinated it is.”
It’s this speech that’s clumsy and uncoordinated.