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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.
Serves you right. This is a classic example of why the Prime Directive prohibits the introduction to primitive cultures (e.g. the marketing dept.) of concepts beyond their current level of development. Think about the consequences of your actions in future.
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.
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...
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!
"There is no 'I' in 'TEAM'"
No, just an M and a E.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
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
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.....
Yeah... yeah... I'm gunna have to... go ahead and ... disagree with you there. :P
No one has ever fired for blaming Microsoft.
From dictionary.com:
Even though verb usage is commonplace, most people still hate its verb form.
Real software engineers regret the existence of COBOL, FORTRAN and BASIC.
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.