… this time it’s consultants using Heidegger to bamboozle clients:
The founding story of ReD sounds more like the genesis of a doctoral dissertation than of a multimillion-dollar company. Madsbjerg says he became enamored first with post-structural theory, and then with the 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who argued that the distinction between objects and their beholders needed to be effaced. When we consider a hammer, we might naturally think of its objective scientific properties: a certain weight and balance, a hardness, a handle with a rubber grip that has a particular coefficient of friction. What Heidegger posited is that these objective attributes are in fact secondary to the hammer’s subjective relationship with the person wielding it. The hammer has uses (a weapon, a tool), meanings (a symbol on the Soviet flag), and other characteristics that do not exist independently of the meeting of subject and object. A common mistake of philosophers, he claimed, is to think of the object as distinct from the subject. If all of this sounds opaque, I can assure you that in the original German it is much, much worse.But before long, Madsbjerg had a list of clients desperate for Heideggerian readings of their businesses. The service he provides sounds even more improbable to a scholar who knows his Heidegger than to a layperson who does not. Many philosophers spend their lives trying and failing to understand what Heidegger was talking about. To interest a typical ReD client—usually a corporate vice president who is, Madsbjerg says, “the least laid-back person you can imagine, with every minute of their day divided into 15-minute blocks”—in the philosopher’s turgid, impenetrable post-structural theory is as unlikely a pitch as could be imagined.
But before long, Madsbjerg had a list of clients desperate for Heideggerian readings of their businesses. The service he provides sounds even more improbable to a scholar who knows his Heidegger than to a layperson who does not. Many philosophers spend their lives trying and failing to understand what Heidegger was talking about. To interest a typical ReD client—usually a corporate vice president who is, Madsbjerg says, “the least laid-back person you can imagine, with every minute of their day divided into 15-minute blocks”—in the philosopher’s turgid, impenetrable post-structural theory is as unlikely a pitch as could be imagined.
But it’s the pitch Madsbjerg has been making. The fundamental blindness in the sorts of consulting that dominate the market, he says, is that they are Cartesian in their outlook: they view objects as the sum of their performance and physical properties. “If you are selling personal computers, you look at the machine and say it’s this many gigahertz, this many pixels,” he says. And you then determine whether a potential new market needs computers that perform faster than the ones currently on offer, and how big that market will be.
USUPhilosophy 
I think Madsbjerg’s reading of Heidegger went something like this:
“The way toward thinking is lined with targeting gaps in a market or sharpening customer segmentation, as the setting-itself-to-work of Dasein is in the gift of the pouring-forth of soda from the Roman Fountain of Diet Cola. Meaning matters because being-in-the-world is a crunching-forth of the data in which a clearing is opened in your pocket so more money can fit in there.”
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