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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.
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
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
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
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.
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