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Buzz Words, Catch Phrases, and Manager Speak?
rivendahl asks: "I have not seen, or perhaps not looked hard enough, to find an article that taps the core of the American business; buzz words. Personally, I hate buzz words, 'clik' words, cliches, catch phrases, and management speak (lingo). One of my favorite pet-peeves is the term, 'going forward'. This whole new concept of 'going forward' grates [on my] nerves. I currently work at a large international company. I have moved departments in the last six months. In my previous department we were made to read books and attend classes on 'positive, forward thinking' and 'action items', as well as classes on 'accepting total accountability'. It made me sick. Please, I ask the Slashdot community to share your displeasure or buzz words along with a few of your most hated management catch phrases."
"It's time to think outside the box!"
Who the hell created this box anyway, and how do I know when I'm outside of it?
Leverage, ugh, it's most often found instead of "use", and it tends to sound horribly wrong each and every time. Perhaps correct grammar and usage, but it doesn't help the lanugage flow, it is overly cumbersome and totally unecessary.
Just leverage use instead.
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
My manager to our customer:
"We chose Oracle and Java because of it's robusticity."
That's not as sad as the people sitting there nodding pretending they know what the hell he's talking about.
I think you're on the same page as this onion piece
"...expanding into the online space."
The CEO of my old company could talk for 30 minutes without saying a single damn thing - two years those of us who were there still make fun of his 'vertical revenue stream' catchphrase.
A classic TV sketch was the "Tiger Team", trying to remember if it was from the Canadian show "Kids In The Hall"?:
"Letmethinkaboutitno."
"Get a tiger team on that now. How's that tiger team coming along?"
A couple of years ago we were starting a new software company. We were going to make digital media asset management systems. We were going to be like Media 360 or Cumulus only better, if those names mean anything to you.
One day I was talking to an important prospective customer, a customer who did a lot of different things with their media. They asked me how one system could solve problem X and problem Y, when problems X and Y didn't really have much to do with each other at that company.
"We don't consider asset management to be a single problem," I said. "Instead, we think of it in terms of a problem space. There are lots of problems that can all be called asset management problems, even though they don't really have anything to do with each other. Rather than trying to solve the asset management problem-- of which there really is no such thing-- we instead apply our technology to the different problems we encounter in the asset management problem space."
A week later, the entire fucking marketing department was talking about problem spaces. "Problem space" became a synonym for "problem," which is the exact opposite of what I mean. I sat in on a marketing meeting once, and heard the marketing manager say, in all seriousness, "How are we doing on those data sheet problem spaces?" I nearly lost it.
That company is now teetering on the brink of collapse. I'm no longer with them-- I was ousted by the president because I guess I laughed too hard at his use of the word "paradigm" one time-- but if you get somebody in your office talking about a "problem space," throw him out immediately.
I write in my journal
Any phrases out of SEI or ISO9000 qualify as manager-speak.
If I hear one more damned sports analogy in any job, I will bring down a rain of fire and brimstone! ...
'He's the quaterback and you've got to run your route the same every time to ensure consistancy.'
'Let's all get on the same page.'
'We all use the same playbook.'
'Let's leave it all on the field.'
'Give 110%.'
"There is no 'I' in 'TEAM'"
I could go on, but I'll spare you
is it that bad seein a hot chick again? if i see a hot chick walkin down the hall i dont say "repost"
Krusty: So he's proactive, huh?
.....[pause]..... I'm fired, aren't I?
Lady: Oh, God, yes. We're talking about a totally outrageous paradigm.
Writer: Excuse me, but 'proactive' and 'paradigm'? Aren't these just buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important? Not that I'm accusing you of anything like that.
Myers: Oh, yes! - The rest of you writers start thinking up a name for this funky dog; I dunno, something along the line of say... Poochie, only more proactive.
-Sean
You have to ask yourself, "Is this good for the company?"
I'll pick the low hanging fruit... because I'm a lazy sod who cares for what's easy not what's ripe.
Not all are management speak; many are just standard
IT industry speak/marketing speak:
"synergy"
"market forces"
"leverage" instead of "use"
"solution" instead of "product" or "suite of products"
"community" for any group, regardless of whether
they have any real commonality besides using a single
vendor's product(s)
"strategy"
Here's one list
and another
Oh, and try the Web Economy Bullshit Generator
I guarantee that all of you, at some point in your careers, will have the opportunity to work with people who whine, complain about how things are all fucked up, and bemoan how nobody listens to them and everyone is stupid.
Generally these same people have no action items, are the least proactive, have no sense of accountability, and in general, do not execute (yet another term).
Anyone can throw ideas and opinions around. It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to recognize that something is horribly wrong and to point it out. It's quite another to take ownership (yet another one) and do something about it.
If for no other reason, these terms get thrown around alot to remind people that they are ultimately there to contribute, further the company's goals (or actively try to change them) and not just to complain.
No, I'm not a manager but have been around long enough to know talk is cheap.
school of humor...
-It's good we're doing this Moving Forward, my time machine is broken.
-I agree on the 5 Action Items, let's call them Tasks for short...
-Hey, don't be Touching My Base.
-That's not Deliverables that's DiGiorno!
-Outside the Box, good idea I need to stretch my legs.
-Value Added? No just for fun.
-Let's Interface? I think that's against corporate policy.
-I didn't Take Ownership, I leased. Now it's John's Action Item. I Thought Outside The Box and Fired It Down the Chain, it's On His Plate now. We're going to Interface on Wednesday. Moving Forward he will be Tasked with this Deliverable. He is Totally Accountable, a real Team Player. So, wanna Do Lunch? Oh I understand if you're Time Constricted. Well it was good we Got This Out On The Table, glad we're On The Same Page with this. We'll Touch Base later, b-bye!
But on the plus side, I do hear a little less of that crap now.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
All those irritating managers with their incomprehensible buzzwords. I'll just go back to work.
I'm currently writing a Web App for our intranet where we try to use mostly Open Source (or rather, anything that's free as in beer - since when is beer free anyway?), using J2EE on Tomcat, with Java Server Pages because dumb CGIs are just too damn fast, or something. We have no design phase to speak of but that's ok since we plan to throw this version away. I connect to MySQL with JDBC but I'm going to need some sort of ODBC bridge to also connect it with Access, if we go that route. I must seperate the presentation tier and the business tier, and somehow magic a third tier into existence because that's J2EE - or so it seems. Some HTML hacks in the same office use a language called PHP, but that's not a real language. My main concern is to sneak Python in somewhere.
(That could have been much worse, but I thought I'd stay close to the truth - it's easily enough to scare managers away :))
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
wtf is the value-add to all your whining, people ;-) ? Please, can we all just get back to value-adding to our core competencies and saving money in the bottom line?
(Sorry, little joke. "Anticipating" doesn't mean what most people think it does. To anticipate being fired, you might stop worrying about your action items and objectives, knowing they won't make any difference. It implies jumping the gun somehow. Say "expecting" or "hoping for" when that's what you mean.)
Techies have their own crappy jargon, but it's used more to stall than to confuse or mislead people.
Oh, so THAT's where they teach people to be incredibly unfunny.
Execute
Team
Win
Someone hates these cans.
Here's a little clarification of corporate lingo.
COMPETITIVE SALARY:
We remain competitive by paying less than our competitors.
JOIN OUR FAST-PACED COMPANY:
We have no time to train you.
CASUAL WORK ATMOSPHERE:
We don't pay enough to expect that you'll dress up well; a couple of the
real daring guys wear earrings.
MUST BE DEADLINE ORIENTED:
You'll be six months behind schedule on your first day.
SOME OVERTIME REQUIRED:
Some time each night and some time each weekend.
DUTIES WILL VARY:
Anyone in the office can boss you around.
MUST HAVE AN EYE FOR DETAIL:
We have no quality control.
CAREER-MINDED:
Female Applicants must be childless (and remain that way).
APPLY IN PERSON:
If you're old, fat or ugly you'll be told the position has been filled.
NO PHONE CALLS PLEASE:
We have filled the job. Our call for resumes is just a legal formality.
SEEKING CANDIDATES WITH A WIDE VARIETY OF EXPERIENCE:
You'll need it to replace three people who just left.
PROBLEM-SOLVING SKILLS A MUST:
You're walking into a company in perpetual chaos.
REQUIRES TEAM LEADERSHIP SKILLS:
You'll have the responsibilities of a manager, without the pay or respect.
Enjoy
Web Economy Bullshit Generator I thought this was common knowledge...
What's funny about "leverage" that in the case what you leverage on, do fail, you sink deeper than in the case it fails without you leveraging on it. Just ask a commodity futures trader.
Sch.
Utilize - it means use.
i never really like people who "touch base" with each other.
:-/
a little to similar to touching cloth.
PS
sorry for the blank comment. hit return instead of tab
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
"Raising the bar" I already do more work than all the reast of my bloody coworkers... and now I need to do more?
"You have to take a step back to get higher" Uh... hello, earth to management. I want a better paying job, I don't want to go to a lesser paying job in hopes that you'll promote me, and I'll still get paid less...
In your next meeting distribute bingo cards with buzzwords instead of numbers. Extra points if someone actually shouts "BINGO" when they've ticked off all the buzzwords!
once i had to change the entire comm protocol of a chat client i wrote (and other guy in the company had to change the server) to a slow xml-like mess, because the boss wanted it to say xml on the box.
My Cultural Anthropology class had an assigned reading on "Doublespeak": Language, Appearance, and Reality: Doublespeak in 1984, by William D. Lutz of Rutgers University. It reviews gems like TV's with "nonmulticolor capability", and "ballistically induced aperture in the subcutaneous environment" (a bullet hole).
Lutz, along with being a Professor of English, was involved with the National Council of Teachers of English Committee on Public Doublespeak (that's a mouthful), as well as the editor of the Quarterly Review of Doublespeak.
The NCTE has only a placeholder page for their Quarterly Review, but it does offer some useful information on their mailing list. A search for "doublespeak" on the same site brings back many hits for their George Orwell Award.
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
Introduce some noise into the system. I tend to rely on "We'll burn that bridge when we come to it", which I first saw in Another Fine Myth by Asprin, back fifteen years or so.
It serves as a good shit-detector actually, because the people who laugh are the people who actually listen to what is being said to them.
It's not just management that must be faulted for using needlessly complex language, engineers are guilty of bowing to the peer-pressure as well. The phrase "doublespeak" has been around longer than I have, and has many children -- "nukespeak," for example.
Searching Google, I find that "nukespeak" doesn't have the meaning I learned years ago. Apparently, its' popular meaning relates to the PR campaigns attempting to sway public opinion toward atomic power. The meaning I learned was entirely different -- it referred to the insanely complex, self-important language used when something bad happened (no matter how minor!) and one had to file an incident report with the NRC.
You'd see phrases like this:
- gravitational disassembly -- "I dropped it and it broke."
- spontaneous energetic disassembly -- "The damn thing just exploded!"
- vehicle-assisted structural realignment -- "Joe backed a forklift into the wall."
There were hundreds of these oddball phrases... but it's been something like 15 years since I saw this, and a Google search for funny "NRC incident report" returns zero results -- which means, I guess, that (by decree?) NRC incident reports just aren't funny. (NRC reports are only available to specific people in the first place, so it's not as if they're out there on the web somewhere.)"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
yeah, just a heads up there...
We're expecting a site visit for a client, so i'm gonna have to ask you to close the loop on that project you've been working on.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
That's got to be my least favorite, except of course when people mean it literally.
"We did this 9 month project, and at the end of the day, the client got a poorly designed, difficult to maintain, and overpriced solution."
"How well do you know _______'s job?"
"Let's take the 30,000 foot view and drill down from there. Going forward, let's leverage our deliverables in an impactful and robust way."
The improper use of "impact" is one of my favorites. Call me anal, but "impact" is not a verb. It is a noun. One cannot "impact" anything, and the only thing which may be impacted is a tooth.
- P
...... I do not think you know what this word means...
Inigo Montoya
I couldn't fail to disagree with you any less.
"Take ownership of the problem" because its always me who has to own it - not the dweeb who called me looking for help, and not the moron who wrote the POS in the first place and who should be responsible for fixing it, but me, because my boss is only responsible for telling me what to do.
I had a meeting last week in which we decided to "park the issues until we can achieve clarity". My company's mission statement includes the word "leverage". Our new CEO has pointy hair and I can feel my tie begin to curl upwards.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
That's how the CIO at a former employer referred to IT. Then again, he also referred to us as "Fungible Resources" during a global IT 'town hall' meeting. I still wonder how many people cracked open their Webster's Dictionary after that meeting. It was bad enough that a guy I worked with wrote a PERL script that would calculate the buzzword quotient on any given document (% of buzzwords relative to the total words).
but there are plenty of stupid speakers.
The problem is not having words or phrases that imply subtle differences in meaning. That is a good thing that enriches the language. The problem is when people use phrases that should imply a meaning other than they intend, in order to sound jazzy. Since they don't actually mean to imply a difference between "leverage" and "use", or "impact" and "affect", gradually these phrases become completely synonymous. The language is robbed of one more means for expressing subtle shades of meaning.
Technical words, such as "Gentoo", or "fdisk" are useful, compact words wtih precise meaning, like "vector" or "matrix" in mathematics. Every field has its jargon, which serves well within the field but are inscrutable from the outside. Management has its own useful jargon: "ROI","balance sheet", "MOU" etc.
Managementspeak, however, is a completely different animal. It isn't shorthand, but more of an elaborately ornamented longhand. It tries to sound like it is saying more than it is. It dresses up the simple to sound profound, the empty to sound substantive. It is inherently deceptive; it is the language of exploitation and chicanery.
People who make words into talismans are in danger of being enfogged in their own linguistic obfuscation. The fetish word "synergy" has lead meany boards into unwise corporate mergers, because it sounded like more than a vague and unfounded wish. People who once held stock in Time Warner probably wish there was no such word in the dictionary now.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I actually quit my last job because I had too much pressure to be a "team player" and "lead taker" (I'm actually very "Dominant" according to any personality tests I've taken (with a grain of salt)); and my "team" consisited of JUST me. The whole company was 4 people.
There were other reasons for my departure, of course, but getting PHB-speak was a main one.
S
Here's a true classic of the "biz-buzz" genre:
Letter to Microsoft HR
Enjoy :-)
Read my blog.
If you say employees are "fungible resources", you are suggesting that one can do any work of another, and there is nothing to distinguish individuals. I suppose that may be true in some circumstances (garment industry sweatshops, for example), but would consider that attitude as leading toward nightmarish working conditions.
Plague, n.: See avoid.
You could've hired me.
glitch.
The all purpose descriptor for ANYTHING technical that goes wrong. From a dead hard drive, to the code red worm, to an intern that tripped over the power cord.....all you have to do is say that there has been a "computer glitch" and people nod their heads in understanding and let it slide.
My former CEO said all the ludicrous things listed here, plus a couple others. At one point, he referred to the process of revealing to our investors the (sorry) state of our finances as "opening the kimono". He also referred to the Website that was his personal baby as our "dollars and eyeballs" site. (This site was neither the most visited nor the most profitable, by the way, but it was one that he developed rather than inheriting it from a previous version of the company, so it was what he cared about.)
Neither of the images generated by these phrases were pleasant.
jf
This will just not go away. "Effect" or "result" work just fine, but I think the impact people get a little thrill out of the word's little whiff of faux-violence. Ironically, "impact" sounds medical in a way I'm pretty sure is unintended (Nurse, that patient's impacted).
Also: "utilize." Helps people avoid the deplorable "use."
-- Apparently, some people are calling me 'Maurice' merely because I said something about the pompitus of love.
Today we are going to cook up a marketing/morale dish that will leave you running for the toilet.
First you will need the ingredients.
1 Director of marketing
1 CEO that is clueless
1 shirt / mouse pad / small gadgets that are a waste of money producer
350 Employees that would rather make more money.
First marinate your Director of Marketing in a large amounts of alcohol and drugs.
Mix in the CEO that has no clue his HR department is underpaying everyone and never comes out of his office to care.
Stir in 350 employees that could not give a rats ass about anything, except coming in and doing their job, and would feel much better if they could get paid what they are worth.
Then take your company name...example CDT Solutions (fake company to my knowledge). Drop off the Solutions on the end and add the word Team to the front. Now you have:
"Team CDT"
Take your "Gadgets to waste money Producer" and let him put it on everything....Mouse pads, License plates, Shirts, Pens, Laptop cases, Stickers, Golf balls, you get the picture.
Also it helps if you give out a free shirt to every employee that says TEAM CDT really big on it. Then every time a customer comes even remotely near your building require everyone were their TEAM CDT shirts.
It also might impress the potential customer if you take his logo and place it on every screen saver in the building. Plus get mouse pads with your, and your potential customer's logo on it in a heart. This seems to help I guess.
Your employee morale is up (or at least looks that way). Plus the customer is really impressed by the fact that your whole company acts as a team. (Yeah right and I might ice skate home tonight too)
When in fact your customer or potential customer thinks you have no clue, but is probably laughing so hard inside he can't get out the words to tell you how stupid everyone looks.
Now your employees are going to spend all day pissing and moaning and morale is sure to drop and cause an even larger "Problem space".
If you really want to add some spice to this dish produce the shirts in only 4 colors. Example...Salmon, Peach, Orange, and Lime. Then when raise time comes, have your managers tell everyone that raises this year are 2% instead of 3% because the shirts had to be paid for.
Now plan and serve.....
"At the end of the day"
A lot of things at the company I work for seem to happen "at the end of the day"..
Have you noticed how these phrases go out of fashion after a year or so?
IN at the moment:
business process re-engineering
pro-active
Total Quality Management
change culture
OUT:
Zero Defects
Synergy
Five nines
Empowerment
Latest trend: inappropriate use of capital letters, for example 'quality' is always writtern as 'Quality'
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
You are confusing jargon with obfuscation and pompostiy.
Just as a doctor might refer to a "minor lac" (minor laceration - a small tear) or a DSP guy might refer to an IIR (infinite impulse response - a class of digital filter) or a lawyer to a "writ of habeus corpus" (literally "present the body" or "let me see my client dammit") in order to save time when discussing their trade, an IT person might refer to "a distro" or "a hotfix" when discussing their trade with another IT person.
However, there is a great difference between using jargon with speaking with a fellow practicioner, and using buzzwords you ill-comprehend yourself to obfuscate your meaning and hide that you have little to say.
For a PHB to say "From this point in time and moving forward, we must productize this feature to garner mindshare and provide perceived value-add to our installbase" rather than "We need to make this something people want so we can sell it" is just a way for the PHB to sound more intelligent than he is.
A true professional, when addressing someone outside his field, will use jargon only when unavoidable, and will define the terms he uses as best as he can. For example, what made Dr. Carl Sagan such a great science presenter was his ability to avoid the jargon of science and speak simply.
As the aphorism sayth: Eschew Obfuscation!
www.eFax.com are spammers
Scott Adams occasionally publishes the Dogbert New Ruling Class newsletter. Each newsletter seems to contain a dozen or more of these little treats: the latest uglified jargon directly from the mouths of Induhviduals. Subscribe, or read them from the web.
Some people where I work say "Walk the talk". Which, aside from being totally cliche, is wrong. You Talk the Talk. You Walk the Walk. You don't Walk the Talk. It's worse when it's high level employees that are doing these things.
Since when did people become "resources". "We're going to need some more resources assigned to this problem." We're people dammit, not tables and chairs!
Here are a couple of the ones I hate (and hear)the most:
Holistic synergism in support of underpinning the processes
Market momentum
Dialog Underpinning
Cross team dialog
Challenge process
Meet the challenge (easier than fixing a problem)
synergy.*
enterprise wide.*
Imagine that you're trying to teach a business student to work in the business world.
Okay, you teach terminology. You teach a couple of business and management models. You cover some basic topics in marketing, and stuff. And then you're *done*. The only thing left is experience, which isn't so easy to teach. And yet you have to give the student four years of education. So what do you do? Fall back on some cute, in-a-nutshell phrases that summarize fixes to a few of the problems that you personally ran into.
I've always been very, very unimpressed with the education business students recieve. That does *not* mean that I necessarily think that business as a job is trivial, just that it's very difficult to teach students "business". It doesn't neatly break down into rules.
May we never see th
I don't know if this is common parlance, but during meetings if something comes up that is not directly on topic, they'll say "Lets discuss this off line." That means "We'll talk about it later." This wouldn't drive us nuts if it was during phone conferences, but I've even had managers use this during informal design discussions. Utterly bizarre.
Well, I can't really think of any buzzwords that haven't already been said. I don't work in that kind of environment any more (thank god:)) I do find it funny when people try and sound S.M.R.T. by using big words. It works for some, but it's downright silly for others. Words like extrapolate, interdependance, eccentricity, or pedantic. Extrapolate is the big one though, I've heard that a lot and I just think it's funny. It's a good word, really, but anymore it seems to only by used by people who want to sound intelligent.
From my last job "synergy" was the big buzz word. Also on my list of dislikes are "paradigm shift" and "proactive". Proactive is a big one at my job now since we obvioulsy want to advocate a proactive approach to everything while taking a very reactive role (as to not cause waves). Since I work in a non-tech atmosphere now, I don't seem to encounter the typical words as much. Now I get things that are more along the lines of "a life of service" and a "community of learning".
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Can someone net this whole thread for me?
Good point. The core problem is that most people don't listen, and most people are not interested in most of what happens in their lives.
I forgot to add my displeasure of certain buzz words used by our US president. In a way he's considered a manager and definitely has his own set of words. How about weapons of mass destruction or axis of evil? There are tons more, too many to list. I find they get on my nerves just as much as the ones used by people at my job.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Creating an insider lingo is an inherent feature of social groups both for efficiency and for exclusion.
It's probably most effective just to be amused by it. My favorite is "Buzzword Bingo". Great for meetings!
What you need is a good Buzzword Bingo card. Just print off a page, and then reload to get a fresh card. Print up a stack for your next all-company meeting.
My wife decided to start using this management-speak at home after some Franklin-Craven training at work. She's my ex-wife now.
Moral: Don't marry stupid people.
but I still have time to squeeze in this post.
I spent a good portion of my freshman english lit class reading "Structures of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn. Quite possibly the most pedantic piece of crap in the world, but it made me realize somehting important: the only people who have any business talking about paradigm shifts are the historians doing analysis after the fact. Trying to do something new and different is what I strive to do every day in my research, and fucking managers and bureaucrats talking about "shifting the paradigm" makes me want to barf. Just my two cents.
Oddly enough, The Economist's Style Guide is dead-set against this sort of buzzword bullshit.
They've got a great list of unnecessary words.
Here's an excerpt from their section on jargon:
I notice they sell a hardcopy of the style guide, you could use it to bludgeon problem co-workers to death.
Mark Twain might have said it best:
I once worked at a high-powered business school on the east coast (guess :). I sat in on a research colloquium with the faculty of Operations Management department. Each month a professor talked about his research. Typically the research was understanding why a certain company was so successfull at some particular function (manfacturing, IT, R&D, etc.)
So it's the department head and his doctoral student's turn...
He throws down a three bullet-point transparency on the overhead.
Point 3: We believe that their success is a result of certain synergies.
The whole hour was a discussion of that fact that these 'synergies' existed. Never did anyone say just what these synergies were.
And every time he said "synergy" he rotated his two hands together. Was that supposed to make it clearer?
Duing meetings my co-workers or team-leads will always get into a discussion which should be taken outside of the meeting, and someone else will chime in and say, "Can you take this off-line" which is supposed to mean outside of the meeting.
What makes them think they are currently on-line?
Buzzwords are different from tech-jargon and acronyms. The last are just shorthand. Buzzwords and consultant speak instead are brainwashing techniques, reinforced by the psychological dogmas which are fostered on us by the "leadership" and management communications lobby. It is good to make fun of them!
having worked at an international myself I can feel your pain with buzzwords. To get around them I just began using counter buzz words. For instance when some said we have to "get all of our ducks in a row" I would say "yeah, that'll make them easier to shoot" . Or if someone said "we need to make sure we're on the same page" I would counter with "Same page!? Half of us aren't even reading the same book!"
It didn't stop anyone but it sure was fun.
Every little puke-brained shit that want's sombody to put together a Lan for their little two for a nickel startup (two hubs a gateway/NAT box and a bunch of patch cables) uses this newspeak neo-word!
I'm as sick of "Archetecting" as I am of "ERP"!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
http://www.sonicsoftware.com/products/index.ssp
... buzzword
------
www.moneybythenumbers.com
Especially as applied to women, "empowerment" means "you have no power, we just want you to think you do"
In Salon. I laughed because I can relate to dealing with people like that (though not necessarily while trying to get hired). And you gotta love the lingo.
Where's the 'so what' in this presentation?
The single worst one I ever had was 'action item' used as a verb--"can you please action this item?"
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
if you want to get picky:
\Gen*too"\ (j[e^]n*t[=oo]"), n.; pl. Gentoos (-t[=oo]z"). A penguin (Pygosceles t[ae]niata). [Falkland Is.]
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
It's a type of penguin. A cute one at that. See this website for details and pictures.
gentoo are a type of penguin that visit the Falklands seasonally.
What ever happened to 'are you getting anything DONE?' - 'Getting Traction' always makes me want to check my shoes... maybe get some crampons.
Nine people looked at me blankly. One doubled up laughing. Spot the geek!
Here's what we used to do at Litton.
When the boss said something stupid, there'd be a dozen iron rings tapping on the boardroom table.
"No..." [tap tap tap] "...I think the marketing department has sold the customer a product which isn't actually possible with our current understanding of the laws of the universe...
[Going up to the overhead projector to ask a question about a budget issue] "Well Boss, I..." [accidentally tapping iron ring on overhead projector] "...think that this budget is best described in the form of a homogeneous, non-exact linear differential equation of the form..." [tap tap tap of iron ring on overhead projector while writing long differential equation on transparency]
And finally, nothing pisses off the marketing department like asking them to take the square root of a negative number. Except actually being able to do it.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
::you were very negative in last meeting:: ::let's stay within the industry standard::
We don't appreciate you for speaking the truth.
We are gonna go with my idea (cuz he/she knows it all...hmmmmmmm)
industry standard...hah...if you keep following the 'standard', how do you expect to get ahead??
that utters the new Jewish catchphrase "irrelevant"..
They've hammered that phrase into every reporter and government spokesperson in sight.
You can not listen to the news for 10 minutes without hearing that word at least twice..
Arrrrrrgh!!!!
- bamboozle
- meagre (?)
- arrogance
- transparent
- fodder
I'm taking your advice, and ignoring (almost) everything you just said. You succeeded in blowing enough hot air to float a hippo, which I'm sure was your intent...we get the joke.As for your leadership mantra, a directed and focused staff is only as good as the lens from which it shines. I believe it is better to stay out of the way, let them learn and do for themselves, and only surface when it is time to tell others to leave them alone. This means if you give them the proper tools and skills, they will work the rest out on their own and be all the better for it. They won't need/expect a nod from you each time they lick a stamp.
I mean, it sounds like something you do with a brand of laundry detergent. "Monetize your shirts!"
This sig no verb.
Also, note that all nouns can be verbed. E.g.: "All nouns can be verbed", "I'll mouse it up", "Hang on while I clipboard it over", "I'm grepping the files". English as a whole is already heading in this direction (towards pure-positional grammar like Chinese); hackers are simply a bit ahead of the curve.
However, hackers avoid the unimaginative verb-making techniques characteristic of marketroids, bean-counters, and the Pentagon; a hacker would never, for example, `productize', `prioritize', or `securitize' things. Hackers have a strong aversion to bureaucratic bafflegab and regard those who use it with contempt.
QED, geeks are guilty of it too - but it's more of a shorthand in the geek/hacker communities.
While it is certainly true that all nouns can be verbed and vice versa, the bureaucratic bafflegab method that suits and such seem to enjoy using is considered extremely lazy - especially the technique I call "izetizing", which is simply appending the "-ize" suffix as to verb a noun. As demonstrated from a previous post, "monetize" gets some popularity from those who would otherwise mean "liquidate" or "sell", the latter if they just wanted to sound like regular old Joes. (The problem with using regular cut and dry terms like "sell" versus "monetize" is semantics. You "sell" something if you need the money to run the company, but you "monetize" an "asset" if you want to "infuse money" into an "investment". Naturally, both mean the exact same thing. Don't ask how I know this, it's less painful.)
So as such, you can see that suits do this so they sound more important. The Armani isn't enough to make them look important, they have to speak in bullsh*t terms. They're basically very well paid politicians - lotsa hot air and little to show for it other than the ubiquitous MBA, which apparently tells people that they have trained in suitspeak 101 and other courses that show just how to be an idiot while simultaneously making yourself look as wise and sage as the likes of Stephen Hawking.
But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
This sig no verb.