My War on Solutions
To view this article in digital magazine format, click here.
If a printed word is looked at steadily for some little time, it will be found to take on a curiously strange and foreign aspect. This loss of familiarity in its appearance sometimes makes it look like a word in another language, sometimes proceeds further until the word is a mere collection of letters, and occasionally reaches the extreme where the letters themselves look like meaningless marks on the paper.” —Severance and Washburn, 1907
It’s called semantic satiation, and it’s happening in asset management. The offending word?
“Solutions.”
(I’m putting the word in quotations because I can’t bring myself to use it with a straight face, which removing the quotations would imply.)
I’ve disliked the word since we founded this magazine nearly five years ago. What may have at one point been a helpful differentiator from “products” has transformed into a meaningless marketing phrase. When everything is a “solution,” nothing is—and so it’s high time to change the language.
But what about truly customized “solutions” like liability-driven investing (LDI), you say? I will grant that there might actually be a one-size-fits-one relationship out there, and LDI might be it. However, the overuse of “solution” to describe not just this, but every transaction between asset owner and manager, has so degraded the word as to make it useless—even in this context.
Does a word actually matter? Yes. The role of language is to clarify, not confuse. The responsibilities of allocators are burdensome enough without having to search through a jungle of rhetoric. A solution is a problem solved; as Managing Editor Leanna Orr asserts, “If all these products were really ‘solutions’, investors would have no more problems.” No asset owner who buys a “solution” would claim freedom from problems.
Sanity does exist in some corners of the asset management-industrial complex. I heard recently of one fixed-income shop that has stopped using the term because their compliance department asserted that “solution” implies a singular answer to a problem, which is itself a problematic legal claim. This compliance group is always welcome to drink on my tab.
I challenge firms to follow this manager’s lead and drop the use of “solutions” entirely. Let us call a spade a spade: Few things in asset management are truly unique, and uniqueness is required for anything to approach S-word status. Let’s default back to “product” unless you have literally never sold, nor will ever sell, the same arrangement (or anything approximating it) to another client.
Is this a semantic rant? Yes. Are there more important issues in asset management? Certainly. But let’s start with the abandonment of “solutions” from our vocabulary—only when we start talking about what products actually do, and not how marketers want us to perceive them, can we address the more pressing concerns of this industry.