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Attack of the Corporate Weasel Words
theodp writes "Does it bother you that churches have a Mission Statement touting their Core Values? That even the CIA has a Vision? In his book Death Sentences: How Clichés, Weasel Words and Management-Speak are Strangling Public Language and in this Newsweek interview, Australian author Don Watson argues it's time to protest the mind-numbing business jargon that infests our schools, churches and political speech. Examples that people have sent to him can be found on Watson's website."
my favorite from TFB would have to be the "Damaging energy exchange". I think it means accident. Although the report in which it was included was at pains to point out that "accident" was an inappropriate term for a "damaging energy exchange", and that the British Medical Association Journal had banned the use of the word "accident" in its articles.' And of course, to "Add value", which is obviously 'to agree with one's boss.'
...the pointy haired boss from Dilbert is not just a myth. Without these words, that I find to be a detestable sore upon my tounge for each utterance, there are managers that would say "Ooh, that doesn't sound so good... why don't you uhh... perk it up a little bit....yeah." Basically we need to find the Lumbergh gene in the human race and erradicate it so we can stop making the stupid bosses happy, then we can dispose of these garbage words.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
Until you get rid of the "never say die" agendas that everyone has, you'll never get rid of this type of dialogue.
They have their spin that their talking points are designed to get across, and so long as they are defending a position that benefits them (no matter how hypocritical or nonsensical), they're going to have to utilize such unnatural speech.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Christianity has always been expressed through the culture it lives in. It should be no suprise that some churches have visions and mission statements -- they want to succeed, and one model for success in America is the corporation.
However, there is a backlash against this strict hierarchical structure, and as many traditional structures are being circumvented by new ways of doing things (blogs vs. old media, P2P vs. old music distribution, network vs. hierarchy, etc.), many churches will change to reflect this. This can already be seen in the Emergent conversation, and in the writings of Brian McLaren, Johnny Baker, Doug Pagitt, Tony Jones, and others...
The worst mission statements are the ones that are just so disconnected from reality- The ones that were dreamed up in a boardroom where no one had ever seem the manufacturimg facility. I bought a pair jeans and on the tag it said that "we strive to create the best most durable blah blah blah" and when I put them on, a button fell off....
How about some honest ones- "We seek to have a complete monopoly on unreliable operating systems..."
I love the ones that have nothing to do with the product... "Our mascara comany seeks to delight our customers, create world peace, and give out random orgasms...."
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
What a curios title, How Clichés, Weasel Words and Management-Speak are Strangling Public Language by Don "The Australian" Watson.
Choking the chicken of discontent, are we? Well, if you've ever worked in a call center, weasel words (lies) and management speak (bullshit) are survival tools. Leverage them wisely.
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What would you hear if you crossed an Australian with a Canadian? G'day, eh. (OK. You think of a better question to make the answer funny!)
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
From Amazon's book description: "... reflects on the way language has been abused so that, instead of being a means of communicating the truth and entering more deeply into it, and of the acquisition of wisdom, it is being used to control people and manipulate them to achieve practical ends. Reality becomes intelligible through words. Man speaks so that through naming things, what is real may become intelligible. This mediating character of language, however, is being increasingly corrupted. Tyranny, propaganda, mass-media destroy and distort words. They offer us apparent realities whose fictive character threatens to become opaque."
If you had read the article properly you would have noticed that all the examples you are quoting are examples he has received from contributors, the opinions on the phrases are also the contributors opinions.
I agree with you that some of those points are uneccesarily nitpicking and anal but I have to say that Detention Centre is certainly a good description of a prison but sort of implies that it's somewhere you can drop in and out of at will when you wish to be detained.
It's really not the buzzwords so much as the matrix of meaningless in which they are embedded.
For instance, I've seen the phrase "core competency" come up in this discussion a couple of times. I've actually adopted that one in all seriousness, though, because it is a valuable concept, especially in this time of outsourcing. (And remember, outsourcing doesn't just mean "to India"... a six-person company can't hardly afford not to outsource HR nowadays, and that is largely a good thing all the way around.) If you are in a company and you can't identify your core competencies, you're in trouble. If you try to outsource your core competencies, you might as well just pack up shop. And you ought to be wary about taking on things that don't play to your core competencies, and you ought to be careful about expanding them if you don't have the resources.
But I use the term very specifically, and because there is no better replacement. The problem isn't that word specifically, it's when it gets buried in passive voice and slapped together with other "buzzwords" and ultimately stripped of all referents. "Core competency" is meaningless if you don't really know what it is, or it has no effect on the rest of the sentence/paragraph it is embedded in (i.e., the paragraph makes sense equally if your "core competency" is spinning cotton into thread or performing top-secret assassination missions). Generally, a "mission statement" ought to say outright what it is supposed to be.
There are other similar buzzwords that if you dig into where they came from, there are valuable ideas there and there are a few others I use in all seriousness, even though I'm more an engineer than a manager. It's really more how they are used, abused, misunderstood, and (perhaps most importantly, as shown above) underspecified that really hurts.
(Here, I'm talking about the traditional "buzzwords". This is a separate class from "words I use to say something without invoking the negative connotations", like "issue" for "problem". Those are basically indefensible.)
Yes, and he wrote it much, much better.
I looked at Weasel Words in the bookshop when it first came out, and it's incredibly dull. Honestly, if someone needs an entire book on weasel words in order to recognize them, they're already a lost cause.
I like the corporate weasel culture. Because when I learn that some biz person is basing their "worldview" on some "business scientology" book, I just "write them off".
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make install -not war
The problem, usually, is that everyone wants to keep these things generic, bland, and inoffensive. They shouldn't be. For an example of a good mission statement, consider this one I wrote for a computer store I'm a partner in:
No weasel words, no paradigms--shifting or otherwise--and no nonsense. What we mean by these terms is spelled out in our values statement (which I won't reproduce here.) Because I have this statement, I can hold my employees accountable to it.A mission or vision that nobody understands is worthless. But a good one is priceless.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Given that I have to say a lot of fairly boring things I would rather put some effort into giving what I say the qualities you describe than just blurt it out. It makes my day slightly more interesting and it reduces the chance of people getting pissed off, which makes me tired (I am old).
So, while you're making a point of being 'candid, frank and direct' I'll be taking the extra five seconds to be polite, diplomatic and cautious. We'll see which strategy turns out to be more stressful.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
A website and plug-in for Word and PowerPoint that measures the overall readability of your documents. It highlights overused consulting jargon, offering witty comments along the way.
http://www.fightthebull.com/bullfighter.asp
Also, for sharing images:
http://depicto.com/
Space and Computers.
Our research group has "solutions" in its name, so when we redesigned and reorganized our web site 4 years ago, it seemed to make sense to include a section titled "solutions." There is also a section titled "our work," with the difference being that the work is a list of projects we've actually done and the "solutions" are categories showing the types of projects we can do.
Looking at our web site usage stats for the past year, the work main page has been visited quite a bit and specific project pages have even more hits, but the solutions main page didn't get enough hits in a year to even show up on the list.
I think "solutions" has become a sort of synonym for vaporware, and people would rather read about something concrete, like "projects" and "work."
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
I work for the ARC, used to be Association of Retarded Citizens, now due to political correctness it is just the ARC. Now I am not recommending we go back to calling the people at our center "retarded" but do we have to call them "consumers?"
Reference SGI, as recently posted on Slashdot, and now heading for bankrupty. After Ed McCracken ran Jim CLark out of the company (and to Netscape where he became a billionaire) McCracken called 800+ managers from all over the world, at great expense, for an encounter session. He handed out copies of "Built to Last" which is a leading huckster for corprate mission statements and lists of core values. Unfortunately this book analyzed successful companies and tried to make assertions about why they were successful that probably had nothing to do with why they were really successful. Companies are successful because they have good people, making good products, products people want to buy and then market and sell them well. Mission statements and value lists are tools for HR types to make themselves feel good, and like they have some useful contribution to make when they dont(they are just there to hire, fire, pay and coordinate benefits). Mission statements and have no real relation to the success of a company. Executives need to make sure their people are working on products that will sell and be profitable, nothing more. As a counter case companies with detestable core values, like Microsoft, Enron and Worldcom can do VERY well. Their only core value is do whatever it takes to destroy all competitors, and make as much money as possible. In the captalist world those are the core values that tend to count towards success.
Anyway back to SGI, they got everyone together and they had HR "experts" pass out questionaires and produce graphs showing the psychological makeup of all the individuals and groups there, and to help them understand themselves and each other. They wrote core value lists and mission statements. They had encounter groups. They all went home and SGI continued to spiral in until it got where it is today. The managers I worked for completely changed overnight as the result of the offsite but NONE of the change was for the better. They mostly started hand wringing about producing schedules that had integrity, unfortunately they started producing schedules instead of products people wanted.
In Jim Clark's book he recounts McCracken tried to use all the same techniques with the small group of SGI founders early in SGI's history. They were mostly engineers who ridiculed all the HR, psychology BS he was pushing. They ignored him, he was just a suit there to give them respectability with Wall Street, no talents anyone could every find. The company was wildly successful for years after, until Clark lost control of the company, McCracken siezed control and had his 800 manager meeting, and then they slid and slid and slid.
Hey all right! Someone beat me to posting it. I am... so touched!
... yeah, over the years I have gotten literally thousands of e-mails about it, from addresses all over the place, including countless big-name corporations whom I won't name to protect the guilty. You know who really loves it, though? The government. I've gotten more e-mails from the military, government agencies, and big government contractors like Boeing than I can even count. My all-time favorite is still the guy from NIMA (which I believe is now called the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency ... think spy satellites).
... they learned English as a second language and they're already familiar with this kind of speech. Now that's just ... sad.
Anyway, yeah, it is a little ancient, but judging from the response I still get to it, it's definitely still relevant.
This strip was once printed in the Industry Standard magazine and in PC World New Zealand, of all places. Not to mention that Xerox once used it as a print sample for some of their color printers. But it's mostly known for having "escaped the lab" and been e-mailed to people all over the world.
And, fear not! I know for a fact that it's pasted on all kinds of cubicles all over the planet. In fact, my boss claims that one of the reasons I was hired at my current job is because of that comic strip.
(In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm the guy what drew it.)
Anyway
Even stranger, though, are the e-mails I get from people in countries where English isn't even the native language. Get your head around that one
Breakfast served all day!
As an American in a political job, I can attest to this. The rule is, essentially, never cop to anything. Always, always spin it back at them. The metaphor is tennis. Admit no error, or fault, or weakness, or tradeoff. Doube speak is the order of the day.
If you do speak honestly, you are marginalized. Instantly. Welcome to the machine.
I'm a writer and editor who appreciates these sorts of books. On Writing Well, Sin and Syntax, the list goes on. Each one gets a note card and the salient points of each book jotted down (which usually fit on one side of the note card). So far, I have nothing jotted down for DS. What he says that is true is said better elsewhere; what he says that is new is...well, I haven't read that yet. The first 1/3 of the book is quite energetic; I enjoy ranting with him about verb-less rhetoric. But then his rather extreme anti-capitalism and anti-Bush views get tiring. For instance, at the 1/3 point in the book, he asserts that the reason public language suffers is the decline in socialism/government management of business. To him, privatization is the Great Language Satan. I see.... Read E.B. White instead. Read the King James Bible. Awash in simple, profound language, you'll find hope of speaking well and less anger at conservatives.