Here’s what Microsoft’s Nadella gets wrong about Oscar Wilde
It’s all well and good Microsoft’s new chief executive Satya Nadella quoting Oscar Wilde – but he might as well have picked any quotation out of thin air and shoe-horned it into his speech.
The newly instated tech boss paraphrased:
“We need to believe in the impossible and remove the improbable.”
He's borrowing from Wilde’s 1891 socratic dialogue "The Decay of Lying". In that text the character Vivian said:
“Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.”
But when Vivian says his line, he's actually bemoaning the English Church's growing reliance on realism.
Before the line Nadella attempts, Vivian says: “The growth of common sense in the English Church is a thing very much to be regretted. It is really a degrading concession to a low form of realism.”
By moving away from things of the imagination (the impossible) and towards common sense (the improbable), the clergy are doing away with doubt – and, by extension, belief.
Vivian explains to Cyril that it is their duty to “revive this old art of lying”. By ‘lying’, he refers to the act of telling untrue things that are more beautiful than reality, that appeal to the imagination.
Maybe not the kind of message Nadella wants to convey to the employees of a very real tech firm in his first day on the job.