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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."
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/games/career /bin/ms.cgi
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If we aren't going to eight-ball on these associative forward looking statements then clearly we've all got to just co-operatively compete in deciding on a common way forwards that brings all of the stakeholders on board, while enabling individuals to determine their own optimal path to success.
My other pet peeve is "solutions" as in "refuse organisation and disposal solutions" - Trash collection.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Didn't Orwell write this long ago:
http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html
"Exciting re-review and recommenting opportunity" for the /. editor's favorite activity.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I misread the "Newsweek article" as the "Newspeak article" and I was all like woah, damn dyslexia.
One time I spoke out very strongly about management speak. Synergy this, leverage that. Buzzword Bingo is not amusing when you see that someone can gain power by saying absolutely nothing at all.
The counter argument was that it's the jargon of management. Just as programmers talk about arrays in a different sense than a layman, or maybe 'threading' for another example. Buzzwords isn't a problem, it's just the language of management.
I think that's EXACTLY the problem. Managers don't talk to themselves. They lead with ideas, and understand the problems of others to help organize solutions. If nobody understands what the fuck they are saying, it's not management!
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I have a small business. I am realizing very quickly that success is often determined by your ability to communicate. (I'm also married, and this rule applies equally well to that.)
If you can't clearly communicate to a client or customer, you can find yourself losing business very quickly. If the client thinks they're getting one thing and you deliver another, that's usually a breakdown on your part. The same goes for clients that don't understand what is required of them.
Clear and concise gets the job done, makes everyone more comfortable, and takes less time than thick marketing copy or 'vision statements.'
In my still-idealistic view of the world, that's how it works. I realize that some companies rely on obfuscation and meaningless text to confuse their customers into thinking they're getting one thing when the proposal says another. Or to lock people into contracts that they didn't understand (ie, zero interest for 12 months).
But those aren't honest. And they don't encourage repeat business, referrals, or customer satisfaction. So in my mind, they don't promote success.
ACTION ITEM!
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
this reminds me of something i saw when i used to work in corporate america. once before a company wide meeting, a friend/colleague handed me a sheet of paper with a grid of boxes on it- like a bingo board, but each box had a 'buzzword' in it- synergy, proactive, win-win, B2B, e-commerce, e-solutions, etc., etc. the goal was to mark off a word every time you heard it in a meeting. if you crossed off all the words in one row, column, or diagonally, you stand up and yell "BULLSHIT!". freakin' hilarious.
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."
I don't know which came first, jargon-talk, or politically correct speech, but somewhere in the last thirty years, speech and writing has become more about saying something with empahis on:
Maybe, though I get slaughtered sometimes, that's why I like slashdot... slashdotters give as good as they take. And usually say what they mean, or at least try. Case in point, how simple could a mission statement (hate that term) be other than "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." be?
I jumped off the politcally correct band wagon years ago when two "corrections" juxtaposed themselves:
You all can fight back by using candid, frank, and direct language. But, you'll pay a price. Utlimately though I think you'll find it much more satisfying.
Just the other day I was ranting to coworkers on how this lingo gets into everyday work.
I was writing up a report and I was including the phrase "Solutions", but I forget what I was solving. Can't I just fix something anymore? Why do I have to deliver a solution?
Issues and solutions, issues and solutions. I with I had an old-fashioned problem. I'd probably just fix it!
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
One of the best counters to this kind of nonsensical speech is the Socratic method of inquiry. Basically, you keep asking questions about what specifically they mean by a certain phrase, and then what they mean by the BS phrase they use to explain the first BS phrase, and so on. This gets rid of a lot of the nonsense speech assuming, of course, that the person speaking such nonsense is doing so out of habit. If the person you are addressing is BS'ing everything because it is to his advantage, then this will go on until the end of time (or at least until one of you gets tired). My step-father actually tried this once with a blowhard and just gave up at a certain point, because the blowhard appeared to have infinite energy for showing that he was "obviously correct".
Similar to the upcoming US election results
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.
That sounds more like a crash to me -- and not all crashes are accidental.
No. A crash would be an "unanticpated and sudden reduction in kinetic energy".
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
The purpose is to present an image to the casual observer. Words are selected for their appearance--"pro active", "standards compliant", "reorganization", etc. sound like action, consistency, and controlled change.
But they mean nothing. That's intentional. The corporation does not want to offer its detractors any ammunition for future attacks. "You said that..." Well, actually, we didn't say anything of the sort. Did we?
Do you seriously expect some organization to give you a clear commitment to anything without there being some significant benefit to them for doing so?
It's inconsistent with the corporation's fiduciary responsibility (look that one up, it's a real thing) to act in that manner. That is to say, if a corporate leader does things because "it's the right thing to do for the world/the customers/the industry", rather than "it makes more money for the stockholders and exposes the corporation to less risk", then they violate that responsibility.
At best, that violation is unethical. At worst, it's criminal.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
What really gets to me is when it's not even based upon the actual words, but upon the "fear someone might mishear." I'm sure everyone's heard about the politician who got lambasted for using the word niggardly. Then, in a play I was in last year, someone objected to an actor who had the line, "Don't get your knickers in a knot," because she was afraid someone would mishear the word, "knickers." *sigh* And it gets to you after a while. I actually find my self balking for a second before using "black" as a personal descriptor, so many people taking offense, seeing it as labelling.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I used to be a mid-level manager. I hate listening to people talking about "forces" (did you mean soldiers?) and "resources" (did you mean employees? workers?). I agree with Watson that this kind of talk is deeply dehumanizing.
So at a monthly meeting, when my boss asked me if I needed more resources to complete a project, I said, "I don't think I need any more coal or lumber for this project. I could use some more people though." I think I nearly got fired that day.
A couple of my favourites:
"Could you join me for a brief scuba in my thinktank?"
"Can we pool our brainspaces in a centre of excellence?"
More here
It has been shown in psychology studies that people judge speakers who use longer sentences and who are difficult to understand as more intelligent than people who speak concisely. Especially in the case of authority figures, we tend to assume that the fault lays within our selves for not understanding their novel phrases or convoluted sentence structure. Like the parable of the "Emperor's New Clothes" people are afraid to admit they understand what the authority figure is talking about lest they be mocked by others.
This phenomenon creates an incentive to create "management speak." People will be less likely to question you if you confuse them. People won't complain about being confused because they fear being called stupid.
The way to stop this nonsense is cleary to make wildass fun of it in a beer commercial. Remember all those idiots that used to say "what's up" in passing in the hallway? That all stopped after the WWHhhaazzzuuuuup beer commercials. If you make them feel like a jackass on a BEER commercial, they'll stop in short order. Or should I say: If you apply a poor quality rating to the suppliers deliverables in a widely accepted public forum, the resultant reconfiguration of the parameters is likely to change toward a positive outcome.
I was biking around and I stopped for a cafeine refuel... decided to drink my cup inside thanks to the nice air-conditioning...
There was a couple sitting at the table next to mine, the man was elaborating at length on some kind of organisational scheme, using the latest buzzwords. And his female companion seemed impressed!
Having finished my drink, I stood up and asked the man: "You must work in HR, right?"
He looked bemused, and said: "Yes. How did you know?"
I just smiled and left.
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
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