Insightful note on the complexity of rules by Norman Bartczak
I’m attending Jeff Sonnenfeld’s Yale CEO Summit this week, and this morning listened in on a fascinating presentation by my colleague, Norman Bartczak, who manages to make accounting interesting! Among the many things that caught my eye in his presentation was the following quote from James Madison:
“It will be of little avail to the people that laws are made by men of thier choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.”
Wow. What if we applied the two tests of simplicity and coherence to the kinds of rules and agreements that have led people into so much trouble - think credit card agreements, mortgage agreements, car leasing provisions and others? It would be a world that is far easier to understand.
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- Posted: Thursday, June 05, 2008
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Rita, your post made me think of the example of end-user software license agreements. Having been involved in creating and negotiating these for business-to-business software apps, I am appalled at the complexity and willful inscrutability built into licenses for—well, you name it—Microsoft Office, iTunes, etc. It’s deceiving to single any out, because they are all terrible and unfair. The terms cannot be understood by anyone who’s not an attorney, and in any event (as opposed to B2B agreements), they are nonnegotiable.
Why are they used? For companies to wield power over their customers. When you open one of these agreements when installing new software, the message is: “Be careful, user. If you use this software in ways we don’t approve of, we will find something in this agreement to punish you with. We have teams of lawyers standing by if you make the wrong decision. Click ‘accept’ to continue.”
Software companies might admit privately that they don’t enforce all the onerous terms in their end-user license agreements, but having an unfair weapon and electing at the moment not to use it is still unfair.
regards, John
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