WordWealth: adumbrate

ad·um·brate ('a-d&m-"brAt, a-'d&m-), v.t., -brat·ed, -brat·ing.

This is not the place to adumbrate all the evidence of British management failure over the last few years (although the article itself obligingly mentions quite a lot of it, including Equitable Life and the pensions debacle, Marconi, NTL and fat-cat pay). We have been there before. More interesting perhaps is to reflect on why pointing them out is such a thankless occupation. —— Simon Caulkin in Best of British? You're joking, The Guardian, Jan 19, 2003; Argues that our companies are winning awards - but usually only if they have foreign management.

The way companies now see themselves largely chimes with the vision adumbrated in 1990 by the management guru, Charles Handy, when he argued that companies were "communities not properties", and that profits were "a necessary but not sufficient condition of success". Even so, the emphasis boardrooms place on being good citizens has led to them being attacked from both sides. On the one hand, there are those who believe that the commitment to the environment, society and human rights is just window dressing, and that business is merely disguising the iron fist of ever-greater power and control in a velvet glove. On the other, there are critics who say that the business of business is business, and that corporate responsibility can be harmful because it detracts from the task of providing profits for shareholders.—— Larry Elliott in Turning Point, pressure for change, Nov 05, 2001

It is not impossible to adumbrate the general nature of the catastrophe which threatens mankind if war-making goes on. Modern warfare is not congenial to the working masses anywhere. No doubt the primitive form of warfare, a murderous bickering with adjacent tribes, is natural enough to uneducated men; but modern warfare, and still more the preparation for it, involves distresses, strains, and a continuity of base and narrow purpose quite beyond the patience and interest of the millions of ordinary men who find no other profit in it but suffering. The natural man is more apt for chaotic local fighting than for large-scale systematic fighting. Hatred campaigns and a sustained propaganda are needed to keep up the combatant spirit in a large modern state, even during actual hostilities; and in the case of Russia we have a striking example of the distaste a whole population may develop for the war-strain, even during the war and with the enemy at its gates.—— H. G. Wells in The Idea of a League of Nations, The Atlantic, Jan 1919

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