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Is Corporate Speak Invading Your IT Department?
Worse than Political Correctness asks: "With several years of system administration under my belt, I am moving toward a slightly different role at my company. I am going from a straight system administration role to more of a high-level systems architect for a mid-sized company. There have been several promotions in our department recently, and use of this slang is growing faster than a Dave Chappell bit. Right now, I feel like unless one studies and masters the use of these pretentious buzzwords and phrases, he/she will be run over by people with worse ideas but a nicer-sounding delivery. Is corporate speak a necessary evil? "
"I have noticed that as I deal more and more with upper management, selling them on products and direction, as well as with hardware/software vendors, the dreaded corporate speak slang is becoming part of my daily life. No longer is there more work to fill an already full plate, now there are 'opportunities for growth'. There are no company layoffs, there are 'realignments'. Difficult people are merely referred to as 'more challenging' than others. I dislike this non-speak as much as any person bred from a technical background. However, in order to match my new colleagues in the give and take of business life, phrases like 'functions', 'deliverables', and 'value-add' are finding their way into my vocabulary."
Is this just something one has to cope with in order to climb the corporate ladder? If you've found yourself in this position, what things did you do to cope?
Is this just something one has to cope with in order to climb the corporate ladder? If you've found yourself in this position, what things did you do to cope?
I feel like unless one studies and masters the use of these pretentious buzzwords and phrases, he/she will be run over by people with worse ideas but a nicer-sounding delivery. Is corporate speak a necessary evil?
No it is not, in fact, it should be resisted at all costs. Corporate speak is the opposite of language. Language is used between people to discuss ideas and express their emotions to each other. Corporate speak is used for precisely the opposite, to cloud ideas behind a vineer of self assumed intellect. Often coporate speak can be decomposed in to concepts so simple that they're essentially obvious.
An example from one of my previous rants on this topic: "You can use the leviathan forces of attention and enthusiasm that are swirling around Web 2.0 these days as a powerful enabler to make something important and exciting happen in your organization."
This is a fairly typical management-speak sentence but what does this actually mean? The sentence essentially boils down to a simple statement: You can use new technology as an opportunity to improve the operation of your business. I think most would agree this is an obvious, uninteresting statement and this is precisely the point I'm trying to make. People who use this language are trying to sell you something that's obvious; to sell the emperor his own clothes. If somebody can't make their point in plain english then they likely don't have a point that's worth hearing at all.
So how do you fight it? I find the following techniques work:
I love our language and I love the mutual heritage shared across the many countries that speak it. Work with me to remove this cancer from our workplaces because our language is part of who we are. We simply can not allow something so abhorent to become part of our definition.
Simon.
What's with teh "No comment" mode?
Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers!
and pretend that they don't have to interact with the rest of a company as a whole,
yeah sure that'll be a recipe for success.
I know in my company I've seen a member of another IT group move up fairly quickly and he speaks corporate lingo pretty well. Not to say he doesn't have talent but I can see where his "speaking the jive" helped him along with upper management.
The question seem to be "who do you want to align yourself with (in the company) and can you get to your desired position with them?" If you want the position you're going to have to play their games to fall into their good graces, otherwise you can hold your head proudly high as you muttle through a job you'd rather not have.
Or you can just move on altogether and hope for better.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I find a martini helps.
Seriously though, I can remember when I was in my early adult life calling my older brother a yuppie and a sell out as I heard corporate speak creep into his vocabulary. Now, years later, I am as bad as any one. We all learned geek speak and tech speak in order to communicate with our peers. This is just another vocabulary to learn. If you want to be understood by non-IT coworkers, you have to speak their language.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Take 'deliverable', for example. Nothing double-speak about that term, it's a business technical term with a specific meaning. 'Function' - though this one has the possibility for misuse, again it's a specific technical term to describe separation of responsibilities if applied to people, or specific capability if applied to a computer system (which may include both hardware and software).
Don't dismiss all of it, because some of it is exactly the kind of jargon you'd be used to in, say, programming. But keep an ear open for someone who's plainly speaking gibberish though.
Cheers,
Ian
I find buzzwords very helpful to utilze during meetings. They help to keep the team alert and aware of exactly what is going on.
The television will not be revolutionized.
I have a hard time remembering all of the acronyms and buzzwords in IT - especially when one buzzword can mean different things in different contexts.
To make a long story short, I was labled a "retard" and canned.
When at work, know all the buzzwords so you can look intelligent - whether or not you are. Like it or not, techies are just as duped by image as anyone else. Nobody, especially in tech, wants to appear ignorant or stupid - it's a career ender.
If you've found yourself in this position, what things did you do to cope?
I cursed a lot. Instead of calling somebody "more challenging", say he's an "asshole". It helps.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
While it makes for great material for Dilbert, the fact is that a lot (not all) management speak does actually have a purpose and meaning.
Let's look at some of these examples:
There are no company layoffs, there are 'realignments'.
Very rarely do layoffs simply mean reducing the number of people performing a particular function. Often, there is a fundamental change made to an existing business process, so people and organizations do indeed need to be "realigned" to support the new environment.
"Functions" should be pretty obvious - what activity is an individual or group performing in support of a given process?
"Deliverables" - these are the tangible results that are to be achieved through a given project or activity. Nobody cares whether you're 67% of the way done, or 72% - they want to know when the Deliverable can be expected, so they can then act upon it.
"Value Add" - this is when you take a strip down a process to its bare bones and examine where the benefit to the company or customer is truly being applied. Steps along the way that don't increase that benefit are candidates for elimination or automation.
These are actually pretty powerful terms, and it's important to have a common vocabulary that can be used when bringing together managers from varying fields like sales, IT, operations, finance, etc.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Start thinking "outside the box". You need to take a more solution-oriented approach to your problem and focus on your deliverables.
I think you'll find that if you shift your paradigm a little bit, your growth intensity will increase by orders of magnitude.
Just create a win-win big picture for yourself and you're success strategy will manifest itself with "positive team margins" for everyone around you.
Leveraging synergy means killing two birds with one stone.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Dont YOU worry about blank, let ME worry about blank... or Blank? BLANK!?! you are not looking at the big picture.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Unfortunate? Yes. Ugly? Absolutely. And some folks are aware of just how bad it can get. But it may also be unavoidable in the rarified air of the management environment.
Communication is, among many other things, using terms and phrases that others understand. And some management-speak ("deliverables," "work-products," etc.) has precise meaning within the work environment. Not everyone knows what those terms mean, but in the shop that uses them regularly, not only will they be recognized, but for instance if you ask them what the difference between deliverables and work-products are, they can tell you. (I picked those two because, having worked in the office of a process improvement consultancy, I know what the difference is too. Or at least, I know a reasonable-sounding set of definitions.)
It may be an odd dialect they speak, but they don't do it just to confuse people. They do it to communicate, and it's worthwhile to learn it even if it does sound stupid.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Work with me to remove this cancer from our workplaces because our language is part of who we are.
Step one:
"3. If your in position of power..." should read "3. If you're in position of power..."
Everyone has to deal with this at some point, and everyone's going to have a different opinion about it.
:-(.
When you're talking to superiors, use whatever language they want, standing your ground only when someting REALLY bugs you (like I do when folks ask if I "have enough bandwidth" to do something unrelated to data transmission). When talking to folks not your superior, use whatever language you want that is clear and effective. This way, you get the best of both worlds for (IMHO) marginal effort.
When you do pick a battle, in general you want to make sure it's private and the evidence is overwhelming (nobody likes being corrected by an underling in front of their peers).
Now if only we could get folks to stop mis-using "tragic." Consequences can only be tragic in the traditional definition if preceeded by an act of hubris (look it up). It's gotten bad enough, however, that dictionaries are generalizing the definition to match the evening news, so the battle may already be lost
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
You're going to have to know the corporate lingo in order to survive in that culture. That doesn't mean you have to use it.
Be aware, though, the jargon evolved for a reason. While doing contract Sarbanes-Oxley work for a major telcom, I found that meetings that used jargon were far more efficient than the meetings that didn't. That doesn't mean that everyone uses it meaningfully and responsibly, but when you're in a room with a group that does, it can be amazingly efficient.
Read the Wall Street Journal for guidance on how to talk about business. The Journal covers most aspects of business, yet there's very little "corporate speak". If you follow their style, you'll come across well to upper management, all of whom, unless totally incompetent, read it daily.
Is corporate speak a necessary evil?
Nah, dude.
There you are, staring at me again.
There you have it. Upper management. The bane of IT's existence. Mostly vacuous, possibly harmless, but given the reins of power and turned loose with their copies of "The 7 Habits of Highly Defective People" and sent out to manage projects and departments which they know nothing about. And because they are for the most part ignorant, they develop these buzzwords and this slang to make them appear learned, while all it does is make them look stupider.
Tell them to piss off.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
When you listen to two people chattering away in corp-speak, all they're doing is trying to convince each other and/or themselves how great they are or this option is or whatever.
Sometimes it is used to pretend that the problems aren't really problems, or that they aren't as bad as they really are.
Finally, it is used to assign blame for failure (althought "blame" and "failure" are not the words used).
A. You can talk about exciting opportunities to align the company with industry leading visionaries
B. Or you can say "it will cost $5,000 and take 2 people 3 months to implement and increase our sales by $2 million a year".
When you don't have "B", you talk "A".
It's all about selling, inside your company, outside your company, your project, yourself, your soul, your loyalty, you ideas, your lies, your co-workers down the river.
Corp-speak is what they use when they don't have anything else and they need to persuade themselves and others.
Is this just something one has to cope with in order to climb the corporate ladder?
When you are just an IT guy, speaking with other IT guys, you can say, "Alice is lazy." or "Bob is a selfish asshat." or "Charlie is overworked." without any fear of reprisal. Who cares what you think?
Once you become a suit, however, you can't say things like that to your fellow suits (at least not in public) because when Alice, Bob or Charlie gets fired, doesn't get a promotion, files a greivance, or feels their bonus is too small, your comments will be held against you. So, Alice becomes "externally motivated". Bob becomes "independent and self-reliant". Charlie becomes "a key asset". Who the heck talks like this? More importantly, who the heck would *want* to talk like this?
Why, other suits, of course. Suits want to be able to communicate with each other, but not necessarily communicate with non-suits. So, they use a thousand words of double talk to avoid answering a simple question, because if they were to give a real, informative answer, it would get them in trouble. What do you say when any answer, including dead silence or "No comment." would cause wild rumors in the department and mass defections, or cause your stock to dip, or make the IT guys revolt, or otherwise tie your hands at some point in the future? Why, you use a weighted cost benefit analysis strategy to rationalize the ROI for all the relevant options, and leverage those key insights into a forward looking strategy for addressing the primary mission tasks in a teamwork-based approach.
And while everyone is trying to figure out what you just said, you slip out the side door.
When your words carry more weight, you use them more carefully.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Is it just me, or there other slashdotters that don't know WTF you define 'corporate lingo'. Its a pretty vague term which is apparently all negative according to this crowd. I can imagine hate for something thats an aface to you, but what exactly is 'corporate lingo'? I've been in IT and business for a good seven years and I've never heard the term ever mentioned. Not from IT guys, business people, anything. Maybe could you use a more acurate in describing what you hate. Talking of vagueness, you aren't doing a good job describing what you hate. Its like saying 'I hate Windows' and leaving up to the reader to infer why.
Could it be you hate liars that make themselves important through generalities? Well you don't need to be a 'business' speaker to do that. I've seen many a technical worker try to snow job their way through work. Often, they suceeded.
I've had difficulty at times related to my lack of business savy. ROI's were a pill to swallow as an IT guy just trying to make things better. For us its easier. If it makes things better, we should probably do it, and now! Wereas in business, there's more to a problem than just the most elegant and immediately relevant solution.
So bringing this back to the beginning, what are you talking about? The clash between business/techical ethics, assholes trying to game the system, or something else?
Bye!
Kettle Meet Pot...
As much as you apparently abhor "corporate speak"... its just slang (as you point out) specific to a particular culture. You seem perfectly comfortable using euphemisms ("an already full plate" vs. "too many things to do"), these are just new ones. Every culture and group has it... think of how many you use in the IT world. Would one of your non-IT corporate wonks understand if you told him you'd ping someone and get back to him?
Oh stewardess! I speak jive... Jus' hang loose, blood. She gonna catch ya up on da' rebound on da' med side.
(and don't even get me started on Gladiator movies)
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
Surely you meant to write "ghastly", didn't you?
I'm now the Data Manager for a Research Data Center in the Medical Genetics realm, and we use a lot of corporate-speak - well, more like doc-speak (most researchers here are MDs).
We refer to PTSDs, use abbreviations like Htn. for Hypertension, and things like that.
One of my jobs is to make sure it gets untranslated, that we actually enter the true pharmacological name for medications instead of our common abbreviation, though.
It's like when I got promoted in the Army, and was able to give legal orders, I had to unlearn all the swearing that we used to do before that.
One adapts.
Now, force that line to compile and pass it some heavy switches, soldier!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I have learned a lot of this business terminology not from being a corporate wage slave (which I am), but from doing outside contract work. I think its a good idea for consultants learn these buzz words, since often enough they are dealing with business people as clients. I believe that corporate-slang word "deliverables" is really a legal term found in most independent contracts. Otherwise suck it down and tell them you have "domain specific" knowledge and the ability to "add value", and the man will pay you.
Corporate Speak does have its place when presenting ideas and talking to management. I don't think that phrases like "organic growth" and "level setting our value add contributions" really help System Engineers manage the actual hardware or userbase within their organizations.
The hardcore techies who focus more on buzzwords than technical knowledge will eventually find their existing technical skills becoming obsolete if they don't make a move to management.
Just the other day on my way into work, I saw a former DBA on the street corner, in a beat up suit asking passing people "Hey buddy, Can you paradigm?"
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
There is no getting away from corporate-speak, but we can try to curb the worst excesses.
What I find most offensive is when words that are not verbs, are made into verbs:
Action is not a verb, and making it one does not clarify what the PHB is asking me to do. From an aural perspective, it has more interesting implications, and I assume that is why the suits speak that way.
When I discuss a technical problem with my colleagues, we use acronyms and concepts that my manager simply does not understand, but we completely understand. In doing so, we are able to communicate more efficiently amongst ourselves. I wonder if the suits are not doing the same thing?
When all else fails, there is always bullshit bingo!
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Each of those phrases, and many others you run into, have real meaning. Others in this thread have already commented on the specific phrases you bring up.
The reality is that people speak in terms that are common to their field. If you read any of the literature that your business peers reads, run in the same circles that they run in, and even think about the same problems they think about, you'll find yourself adopting their terminology.
It will make sense to you to do so, for the terms they use are actually more precise in their intended meaning than the replacements you give. You are tending to describe the main action or effect of a particular phrase, but the phrase actually encompasses much more. A realignment is exactly that - it may have the effect of layoffs, hires, and other movement of people, but it doesn't necessarily involve all or any of those things.
When they speak to you about a realignment, and you say, "Oh, you mean layoffs?" they will simply tune you out.
If they were to come into your field and choose not embrace your language you would certainly feel as though they don't really understand, and you would subsequently marginalize them and their work.
-Adam
I'd say that lettting it collapse as soon as possible is the best thing, but that is not a complete solution. We need to work on a new society infrastructure required for a healthy society. Unfortunately, the current dying society is using resources that will be required for the new infrastructure. In order to remedy this, wars will have to be fought.
Paintball.
NAS (Network Attached Storage) is hardware that connects to the network with minimal computer components.
NFS (Network File System) is a Filesystem layer exposed to clents for connecting to storage on the network, be they NAS or server-based storage.
There isn't necessarily a clear line between NAS and server-based storage, but there is a clear difference between NAS and NFS.
When will this cliche padding end?
You do NOT have to start speaking corporatese yourself, at least, not mostly. You may occasionally have to demonstrate the ability to do so, but on the whole you should express yourself clearly in plain English. However, not being able to decipher the unclear speech of the higher-ups would be a significant problem. However lame their lingo may be, you'll nonetheless want to learn enough of it to be able to understand them at least as well as they understand one another. And, I should note, this sort of language is not very hard to learn. It's much easier to deciper than e.g. legal verbiage, or even some of the weirder corners of academia.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Use words that add meaning to what you're trying to say. Don't use words that subtract meaning from what you're trying to say. Calling layoffs "realignments" and difficult people as "challenging" is obviously just doubletalk nonsense designed to hide what's real. But value-added and total cost of ownership are phrases that actually convey meaning that other phrases/words don't.
Also, don't abuse these words either. Know what they actually mean and when to use them. There's plenty of people that don't know what they mean and throw them out like buzzwords. Maybe that's why the original poster thinks all corporate speak is a load of dingoes' kidneys.
AccountKiller
You merely have to remember that objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
Liberty in your lifetime
All specialized realms have their own jargon. Managers deal with a corporation's resources, and employees are a resource that has to get hired, paid, evaluated and either promoted or fired. "Realignment" doesn't strictly mean "round of layoffs," but managers understand that realignments often result in layoffs. Management speak has its share of euphemisms: Sometimes managers have to do unpleasant things that will affect other people's lives. But for the most part, it is nothing more than a specialized vocabulary for dealing with resource issues.
But don't say "paradigm" if you can avoid it. Or "synergy." Finally, don't hesitate to use your pre-existing specialized vocabulary to bullshit your way through bullshit situations.
This is not my sandwich.
First sentence: No problem.
... your growth will accelerate by orders of magnitude. is a better rewrite of what was said, but the idea should be challenged, both the degrees by which "a little bit" and "orders of magnitude" would seem to indicate.
Second sentence:
Third sentence.
If you look for a situation in which everyone can win, a successful stategy conveying many benefits will become clear.
Again with ideas that should be challenged.
Cursing is a sign of weakness and leads to more trouble than the satisfaction is worth. I found to always be direct but polite is more efficient and in the long term gives less negative side effects. And if you can't say anything good about a person you don't realy care about, better don't say anything at all. Calling too many peoples arseholes just dilutes the meaning and put those really deserving this description into a better light by association.
As to the buzzwords, for me works best if I speak to management in simple terms even my grandmother would understand. If I get exposed to a barrage of buzzwords from other manageroids, simply restating their drivel in simple words exposes its meaninglessness and does wonders to deflate them and presents them as charlatans. And asking managers to confirm after some very positively formulated statement that they just proposed to fire half the department is just priceless.
I understand it alright, but i make a point out of answering corp-lingo in a most abrupt manner: Management type: Well we most definatly have to consider being more on and keeping proactive, to be ready for a paradigm shift in the flow of how.. Me:Mm..yes? Written work order please...state assignment and deadline. Might be because i'm a far lefty, but i really think they are closing in on Ron.L hubbard's wierdspeak..
Think of it as just another scripting language to learn.
There's management-speak and there's bullshit.
Management-speak isn't necessarily bad. As another poster stated very correctly, a lot of these words and phrases have real meaning, although I've banned my girlfriend, who's a pretty high-level strategy consultant, from using "input" and "feedback" in a personal context.
Assuming you're a smart cookie, you can pick it up and figure out for yourself where the boundary lies. "Risk", "framework", "synergies", whatever, all have their place. "Realignment" instead of "layoffs" does not.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Don't you know that if you increase mindshare through leveraged cobranding and achieve maximum potential commercial exploitation opportunities, then the infite vectors of enhanced promotional opportunities can help potentially engage the optimal customer experiences, all in order to studiosly avoid corporate and industrial re-alignments that may or may not cause employee morale to nosedive while mortgage payments go to collections due to ...uh.. your ass showing up on www.fuckedcompany.com
Here are the first 25 hits on 08/02/2005, when I wrote this story:
This is not a complaint about QWest, which seems to have good telephone and DSL service. But their marketing language may need reconsideration.
If you need a list of over-used terms, visit the Bullsh**t Bingo web site. There's a Bulls**t Bingo movie, too. I think they should do a re-make of the movie in which, once Bingo is reached, the speaker is required to leave the room immediately. (Remember to put quote marks around phrases. We respect the ownership of any trademarks on the list.)
When you hear this kind of stuff, call people on it. They will be amazed, if you are charismatic enough.
Right in the middle of the meeting, assuming everyone around you is part of the company and not clients/customers, say "Hey Bob, hold up a second. Why exactly did you say 'revirtualization of the engagement parameters' instead of 'come up with a new plan' just there? That sounds a bit like a buzz word babble. Now I don't have anything against you personally, but I don't think that kind of talk is appropriate for the workplace. It just leads to confusion of terms, and unclear communication, and when you don't have good, clear communication, you fail as a business."
The profession of IT is well known for copying other group's jargon just so they can ride on their hype. Examples:
The phrase "in production": used to refer to a server whose configuration should not be changed. Stolen from manufacturing, where it refers to a design not to be changed in the middle of a production run; nothing the average IT guy runs is as rigid or as important as a real manufacturing design, for manufacturing things out of atoms. Log on to the goddamn server and update the software, and stop trying to use buzzwords to get out of work. Note: a web server you stuck on the company's network without permission years ago, and is now running 30 or 40 different websites and a CounterStrike server for your friends, but you have forgotten the root password, is not "in production".
"DMZ": For "DeMilitarized Zone", an area where two cold war enemies agree not to put weapons, so they can focus on ripping off their respective taxpayers instead of fighting. Real demilitarized zones can get you killed by just sliding off a muddy road into a minefield. An IT "DMZ" is an admission that you can't actually get any work done behind the firewall, and that they don't know how to make the servers secure without the firewall, dressed up in some military jargon for mental masturbation.
"Firewall": A real firewall stops an engine fire from spreading to the rest of the car. An IT firewall destroys the usefulness of the internet to avoid fixing certain broken software.
"System Administrator": Computer janitor
"Systems Architect": A computer janitor who does no work, the equivalent of "middle management"
The use of "X Speak" to refer to group X's jargon, as in "Corporate Speak" in the story above: This comes from the book 1984. Only people who don't use their own ghey jargon are to be taken seriously when complaining about other people's ghey jargon. Thank you.
Where I work they would say that corporate speak is "invasioning" our IT department.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
A lot of people like a straight talker. People who avoid flowery language give the impression of honesty and reliability. You don't need realignments. You need layoffs! Otherwise you're lying to people. Which is completely pointless because you're not actually deceiving anyone, so you're a bastard and a liar rather than just a bastard.
Avoid buzzwords, and avoid metaphor. Use jargon if neccesary, but only if it's absolutely clear from context or general use that everyone knopws what the jargon means. Learn the difference between jargon and buzzwords.
As you've obviously already taken a position that moves away from pure techie to more general management already then you should take onboard that to succeed in that role you have to interface effectively between IT and Management.
:-)
Maybe you've not picked up on it yet, but managers are usually scared of dealing with the IT department. In most companies nowdays the managers are will aware that the company would collapse without the IT function, but at the same time they don't fully understand it and it's a cost centre which eats up their profits so is easily resented.
Which is where you come in. General managers speak corporate. Get over it, they're comfortable with it so you have to be too. They are also quite aware that the IT department speaks techie - which they are painfully aware they don't understand. Niverna to a general managers is an IT type, such as yourself, who can communicate with with them on their level, but they know can then communicate with the IT department on a techie level. They want someone they can trust, feels understands them, but they know can then go away and get corporate IT right for what they want to do without them having to understand the details themselves. In otherwords metaphorically hold their hand and make the worry about IT go away
People who can do this - live comfortably in both worlds and move between them - are worth their weight in gold to corporates. Good ones who can maintain respect on both sides are also rare as it demands being able to handle two opposing methods of mindsets. It's a potentially very rewarding position - in more ways than one.
Surely you meant to write "Judas Priest", didn't you?
'Corporate speak is basically the same type of "Rah-Rah" speech'
"Corporate speak" in technical companies is often due to the speaker not having much understanding of the technology, and not wanting to learn.
See this comment posted later in this story to test a company's credibility online.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned "Bullsh**t Bingo". There is a link to it at the bottom of that comment.
--
Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits & paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & U.S. citizens pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?
You may have had a point if you hadn't used the word "ghey". That destroys any and all credibility you may have ever had, and being an AC, you have no credibility to start with.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
BOB SLYDELL
Uh, we should move on to a Peter Gibbons. I had a chance to meet this
young man and boy does he have Straight to Upper Management written all
over him.
BILL
Ooh, uh, yeah. I'm going to have to go ahead and sort of disagree with
you there. Yeah. Uh, he's been real flaky lately and I'm not sure that
he's the caliber person you want for upper management. He's been having
some problems with his TPS reports.
BOB PORTER
I'll handle this. We feel that the problem isn't with Peter.
BOB SLYDELL
Um-um.
BOB PORTER
It's that you haven't challenged him enough to get him really
motivated.
... although I agree with every single straight-shooter and plain speaker (heck, "agree" isn't the word, so much as "scream hell yeah"), there are a couple of problems.
... we let managers in the front door. And now they've replicated and infested. The Fifth Sherman Tank of the Apocalypse.
Somewhere above, Theatetus spoke about being able to direct an MBA to an RFC and wanting to see a document that defined the buzzword bingo-like terms.
Unfortunately, there IS such a document. Worse, an entire library of such books and three national-global standards.
I'm planning, today, to apply for a job of senior tech support.
One criterion was "experience in using job tracking tools". Which sounds pretty innocuous in and of itself.
But not when you realise two more of the selection criteria were to have an understanding of "ITIL" (the Information Technology Infrastructure Library) and "AS8018 aka BS15000" (which is also "ISO20000").
Oh. And specific and very detailed job-tracking is a critical component of ITIL / ITIL v3 / AS8018 / BS15000 / ISO20000. So much for innocuousness.
These are, sadly, standards which basically bring the (netherhell)world of Business Process Management, right down to specific processes... right to what they so charmingly term "Information Technology Services Management".
Try looking for information about it. Your brain will melt and seep through your tear ducts. Wikipedia, fortunately, has it written at least somewhat less confusingly.
To make the whole damn thing even MORE blatantly neurotoxic?
The standards, being ludicrously specific and anal (and expensive to obtain), still only claim themselves to be a "framework"... and freely acknowledging that a great deal of customisation is required to tailor it to a specific workplace.
Meaning you're STILL screwed because you almost may as well just build your whole IT standards base on your own damn self.
What is happening here is that people are terrified of failure. Usually it comes from the top, as managers and manager's managers set the tone and culture and reinforce it by their actions. But if you work in a Culture of Fear, everything most be portrayed in a positive light or people become fearful and then they start scheming to protect themselves, which in turn causes fear in others around them and then it snowballs.
Most people can't take the truth. Most people will not get far in life because of it. In work, in martial arts, in every aspect of life, you will see the people that are terrified of fucking up, and then you will see those that are not. And you will rarely--very rarely--see those two kinds of people together.
Those that take mistakes in stride and realize that a mistake is a real growth opportunity and is desirable, will avoid the risk averse because the risk averse are suffocating to them. Those that are risk averse will avoid those that thrive on the learning opportunities provided by mistakes because they are terrified by anyone that makes mistakes in their vicinity and even worse will own up to it, confront it, and deal with it.
If you work for a corporation, you have to speak their language. But you can choose which corporation you work for. Not all corporations are Cultures of Fear. If you don't want to speak that language, seek out a corporation with management and leadership that speaks your language. If you see these things now, your eyes are open to it, and when you speak with new companies you will see what you would not have seen before.
You will recognize fear and you will recognize courage. Your choice.
If you work in a Culture of Fear, yes you have to speak their language. Otherwise you are going to terrify them with your openness and honesty and that is going to be bad for them and for you. If you decide to stay in that environment, your best bet is to find those that are courageous and work toward bringing them into your circle of existence (there are always wonderful people at a company, even if it is not readily apparent).
From a practical approach, if you can take it. Speak the language, get the promotion and the experience that goes with it, and then go find a great job at a company that is based on courage rather than fear.
Gotta love this comic strip:
http://www.fatalexception.org/action_item.html
Like, "How much goodness are we going to get from that project?" There are plenty of words that we could use in its stead like "benefit", "reward", "savings", or "revenue". But since people don't know what you're aiming for, they say "goodness". I, personally, say "benefit", because it's ambiguous, but it's still a word you would use in normal circumstances. It's a REAL WORD with a real meaning. However, deliverables is a word that I do use. I also use action item. Those are things we know about and all try to avoid, right? Y'all feel me, mah homies?
There are two main parts of management-speak.
Euphamisms: Managers are soft, girly people who don't like to hear bad news. Instead of telling each other bad news they sugar-coat it. The business is not broke. It is in a "temporary financial situation". Bob is not retarded; he is "developmentally challenged".
If you want a good read, get a copy of George Carlin's "When Will Jesus Pass The Pork Chops". It's not a religious book, but it takes a very intersting look at modern language, religion, and a few other things. It's a funny read, but also very serious.
I, personally, find this kind of speak offensive. It wastes my time. You invent a whole sentence to say what one word would have communicated effectively. You do all of this because you can't handle the cold hard truth and prefer it to be light and fluffy. What do you think? That by the time you're finished telling me that "due to company reallignment, you are not temporarily employment challenged" that I will have forgotten that I'm fired?
Buzzwords are the other type of management speak. Managers are not technical people. I do believe that in the exclusive manager club in the Bahamas there is a requirement for entry that says your technical IQ must be below 1. Managers read buzzwords in management magazines, and hear them at their exclusive manager clubs. It's usual that the buzzword is an inapt way of describing some piece of yesterday technology that some other manager is trying to sell by inventing a new name for it and convincing other managers they need it.
Of course, managers come back from their manager club in the Bahams and they quote these new words they've learned (as if to show off how smart they are that they can learn new words... 'adapt to new paradigms'?). They usually quote them out of context and in throwaway sentences, but insist that the company start implemnting these new things that they know nothing about.
I can think of an extreme case where I got a phone call (recently) from a colleague in another company. His manager had thrown a "technical" document for a device they were supposed to build. The document was actually 4 or 5 bullet points containing the latest marketing speak and buzzwords. In fact, one of the requirements was that the device must use "Socket something or other". Of course, something or other was the marketing name that Intel gave to one of their up-coming processor socket designs that nobody really knows about yet.
The people in this other group were perplexed, but apparantly the manager had picked up this buzzword at some manager club and decided that it was the next best thing and they had to have it, without even knowing what it was or did!
Anywho... my rant is over. Back to implenting a pardigm shift to better leverage the opportunity created by the incremental language enhancements promised by the senior managers.
I drink to make other people interesting!
"Somewhere there's a BBS, maybe it's called "managedot.com", and there's a bunch of managers on there bitching about how IT Speak is invading the management sphere."
Tt's called 'The Golf Course'.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
One thing you should try to keep in mind is that, typically, the delivery of your message trumps the actual content of your message.
As an example, take a look at stand up comediens. Often, the best comediens don't actually have great jokes -- they just have fantastic delivery. (To test this out, try retelling a joke or two from a couple of different comediens without mimicing their delivery - not that funny, eh?)
This fact resonates through all communication forms but is especially prevelant in oral communication. If your delivery is great, even bad news can be well received. If your delivery sucks, even good news will fall flat.
Sadly, part of the delivery factor is speaking to your audience. To deliver the most effective message, you need to use language that your audience is familiar with.
So, in short: Yes, it is a necassary evil.
Sorry.
Just yell "SPEAK THE KING'S ENGLISH! Speak the good king's English, I command thee fool!" whilst beating the perpetrator about the head, neck and chest with a rolled up TPS report.
Welcome to how corporate types have felt for years about techie jargon.
Management-speak, like tech speak, is a specialized jargon which, when properly used, simplifies and clarifies communication between peers. However, just like geek talk, it can be abused by the pretentious and self-promoting.
You know how you always cringe when someone in a movie talks about reversing the binary encryption bus, and everyone around you nods? Well, that's how (real) management types feel when they hear someone talking about synergistic upmarket brand dilution. There are poseurs in all fields, and fakes *love* jargon.
Just like some geeks actually know what they're talking about and can communicate in english when needed, if you give it some time you will find that there is a place in the world for management speak.
And, just like geek speak, don't hesitate to ask for an explanation. Just like pretentions geek wanna-be's, smarmy management wanna-be's can't explain what they just said because they're just buzzwording. And if they *can* explain, they're knowledgeable enough that you can stand to learn from 'em.
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
Reading the comments and examples of "corporate speak," I find it fascinatingly similar to the BS that comes out of the mouths of motivational speakers.
No real substance to it; it's just a show.
1) If you don't communicate well, and don't write good proposals, reports, don't communicate well what you are doing and why, then people who write well written corporate speak can stomp all over you.
however...
2) If you communicate clearly, especially communicate your results to people, corporate speak won't hurt you.
I'm glad you pinged Slashdot about this messaging challenge so we could touch base and send a heads up. This kind of meme is gaining mind-share. The metrics are showing more than just a blip, it's a sea-change!
Moving forward, I think it's clear that we need to leverage our wins and make them part of the overall story. I know that we can wrestle this problem to the ground and dominate several emerging ecosystems if we prioritise and deliver best-practices through the channel. Execution is key.
I really need your front-end alignment on this! Can you get your people on board?
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I can actually defend a couple of these with a straight face. "Deliverable" is the best of the lot: it represents something that you must actually give the client, and as it refers to something that's usually specified in a contract, its usage is generally completely unambiguous. I can't think of another word that does its job so succinctly. If you need to (god help you) manage a real project for a real client, you're gonna have to just make your peace with that word.
Value-add isn't really that bad - it's usually used to indicate what a business' role is in the equation (as in, if the business has no place to add value to something, it probably shouldn't be involved in the process). It at least isn't deliberately obfuscating.
With all that said, cutting through the real BS corporate speak (in a polite but firm manner) is a good way to distinguish you from empty suits, and I've found it's generally respected. Even among the empty suits. As an example: my wife was doing technical training and curriculum design for corporate clients for a while. In one meeting she attended following a training class, one of the suits asked her what "opportunities" she discovered during the class. When she asked for clarification, the suit said, "You know - opportunities. Things that didn't go quite as you'd hoped."
"Oh, you mean problems! Yes, there were a lot of problems." That was the point at which people started to take her seriously.
Honestly, I am sure most Slashdotters want to say how evil corporate people are and how useless Corp-Speak is. But to be frank IT people are just as likely to speak IT talk to their managers. IT people do it for the same reasons Managers talk Corp-Speak, That is how they perceive information. When they ask us Why is the Email down, We go it is because the Interface controller on the Raid Array is down and is being replaced, they hear it is because the bla bla on the bla bla is down and is being replaced. Where they were expecting somethings closer to The Computer crashed and it is being fixed. We think in technical terms and the IT terminology comes out easy because we use it all the time. Now for Corp-Speak they work with the words and phrasing all the time and they are use to using it. So except for saying you can't get that because it is too expensive. They will talk about years for Return Investment and the Costs of using it vs not using it doesn't justify the expense....
Why do they talk like that is in not really to make them selves sound smarter, it is them explaining their though processes and saying it is to expensive is grossly understating the process they did in making the decision. Just as saying the computer crashed is grossly understating what happened to the Email.
It is part of dealing with the people just like if you changed your job from the New York to London while they speak the same language they way the speak is still different. You wont stop them from doing it, if you do try it will just make you look arrogant.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The fun thing about this whole topic isn't the fact that there's a communications divide. We all knew that, but the fact that no one wants to cross it. We even make jokes about it to sooth our unease about our lack of knowledge about the other half. The half that pays the majority of our paychecks.
Well... I guess I am in the position to comment on this one. Depending on your viewpoint, I may be a corporate sell-out, a nerd without spine or just someone who goes where the challenge is.
I'm a CCIE, so I have at least some credibility in the tech department. I spent years working on some of the most interesting projects a CCIE could dream of - network planning, (re)design, troubleshooting, working with Cisco and other vendors to develop next generation features... Yeah, it was interesting and 98% tech-related. After a few years, though, I kind of lost interest. I found that the "next generation" complex system after BGP wasn't RPSLng but instead systems of people. Once you get the RFC, working with the system is simply a derivative. However, there's no RFC for "how companies work" - and there are so many more facets to understanding the system of how people work within a company than within even the most complex network. Maybe it's different if you program java, but for me, I found the interesting challenge elsewhere.
Most of us wonder why the heck our stupid managers make some of the decisions they do. Yes, maybe they are plain stupid. Maybe, though, "they" understand something that we do not - and I wasn't going to let the arrogance of "knowing better because I am a geek" tell me that managers are stupid. I wanted to find out what made them tick.
I am now enrolled in a part-time MBA program at a good institution (and recently recertified for two more years of CCIE-dom while doing it). I've had a job as a "pre-sales consultant" so I could begin to understand how this whole evil sales process actually takes place. I've always wondered why someone with money to spare would give it to someone who, to us geeks, obviously has so little brain as a sales guy.
No, the answer is not that people with money to spare are by definition stupid. The answer is not that sales people are necessarily shallow. The answer is not that earning money is evil. The answer from the IT department should not be "I READ YOUR EMAIL! FEAR ME!", as this is probably the best excuse I can think of to recommend outsourcing to the next CIO I meet.
I'm now at the point where I have taken up a relatively new concept within my company and can make it work partially because I understand the technological concepts underlying it AND because I can explain to companies why it is important for them to invest in my concept. This requires me to speak some of the lingo - and yes, I do talk about adding value to a company's core business processes with the use of our business solution. I talk about the benefits of RFID for supply chain management. I wear an expensive suit and describe the opportunity for growth in a certain market which can be enabled by this-or-that network solution. So, yes, the 'speak' is important if you want those who are likely to make decisions to hear you.
However, having said that, the 'catch' is that there is a lot of BS going around in the corporate-speak-world. If you discuss a routing protocol, there can be no dispute - in the end, look up the RFC or reproduce whatever you're trying to prove. Discussing a company's marketing strategy or trying to make a business case for unified messaging is a lot more shaky. There's no undisputable book or testlab to point to and say "look, you're wrong, see - that's not how it works!". I can quote the latest book or article I read about the latest trend in strategy. I blurt out page numbers of Harvard Business Review articles. This is not proof, though. The guy to which I am talking can always blurt out some Sloan Managment Review article which declares exactly the opposite. Or worse, he will pretend to know it better - and he just might. There's no way to prove it. Professors have been wrong - unlike a routing protocol, which just "is".
This is exactly why corporate BS'ers get away with BS'ing - and why it's so difficult for most of us with a technical background to work with a system that apparently allows tolerance for nonsense.
Corporate-speak is more about defining things in conceptual terms than specifics, this is the core difference.
"When in Rome...."
The best way to be a team player and maximize personal empowerment is to keep your nose to the grindstone and your ducks in a row -- and learn not to snicker or roll your eyes.
...how else are you supposed to explain that you make use of enterprise applications to leverage collective synergy to think outside the box and formulate key objectives into a win-win game plan with a quality-driven approach that focuses on empowering key players to drive-up their core competencies and increase expectations with an all-around initiative to drive up productivity?
Unfortunately, this does happen to be a crucial part in climbing the sometimes obsequious corporate ladder. Know that you are not alone in your situation. Many professionals, in our field and in others, have to learn to live with, and speak, this daunting corporate jargon. Particularly in my position as a business owner, having to deal with individuals in another industry or professional class altogether. I'm a web developer (among other things) who has to deal with salesmen, other business owners, security professionals, etc. And you'll find that all of them have there own special buzz words. Just remember that they went to some business school or management training program and that these are "industry terms" for them just as terms like wireframing, server side coding, or contextual selectors are to some or most of us. My advice is this: 1)when you hear a term that you're unfamiliar with, make a mental note of it and look it up on the net or in a book later. Try to understand their "business" or way of thinking just like we as IT professionals wish they understood our "business" or way of thinking. These may be the same people that a web site can be built by inserting autoshapes and text into a Word document and that it can be done in six to eight hours. And along those lines....2)Find someone in your company who works in the corporate/business/sales arena that is also interested in what it is that you do exactly. Teach them your processes or how things work, and ask them to do the same. This mutual mentoring will do wonders. A wise man once said "Never dress for the position that you have, dress for the position that you want." The same goes for speech and mannerisms. You've somehow moved up the corporate ladder.....keep climbing.
For example, if you really need some special hardware in the back room, and boss can't see why, you either get technical, or make a bloated speech.
If you get technical, your boss might gain more respect for your knowledge, but you are unlikely to get the hardware.
Corporate-speak has a much better overall probability of acheiving your common goals to improve teamwork and general department productivity on the grand scale.
While you're planning to recontextualize holistic web services, be sure to whiteboard interactive infomediaries, otherwise you'll fail to embrace one-to-one models.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, make heavy use of the bullshit generator, and you'll be just fine.
I found a long time ago that it was necessary. I often tell a story of when my company would do product training, they would lump it all together in one week. Half the week were the technical people, the other half was the corporate and sales people. While the materials, venue and presentation were essentially the same, the events were worlds apart. The technical folks were fed cold-cuts, mediocre buffets and domestic beer/well drinks for the events. The sales people were fed hot lunches, filet mignon and top shelf liquor at the events. Seeing this, I was appalled that technical people weren't considered worthy of the same thing as the not-so-bright sales people. After seeing this, I said to myself: "Self, you need some filet mignon and top shelf liquor!" So, I fired up my Jargonator and interviewed for the job. Since then, it's been a rockstar life. The real trick now is to be able to mesh the acronyms with the corporate lingo - Those management types eat that shit up!
The only time you here the buzzwords is when talking about things from our clients' perspective -- and when they're written on powerpoint slides, it's always in "quotes".
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
"You can use the leviathan forces of attention and enthusiasm that are swirling around Web 2.0 these days as a powerful enabler to make something important and exciting happen in your organization." ...was changed to...
...was changed to...
"You can use new technology as an opportunity to improve the operation of your business."
"You can use new technology to improve the operation of your business."
Which has destroyed the original *business* meaning of the sentence. The sentence has nothing to do with the usefulness of a new technology.
The problem I have with these transformations (and the entire thrust of the thread in some sense) is that they destroy the nuances of the jargon in a field that is all about "interpersonal politics" (getting people to do things that benefit someone and potentially hurt others) and hence *social nuance*.
Lots of the words bizfolk use are used simply because they won't cause direct offense where the underlying concepts imply damage to the interests of some parties. If the damage were explicit it would require bargaining while if the damage is ignored no recompense is obviously required... except in more subtle ways that hurt the orgnization in general rather than the specific parties.
For example, if someone is given firing authority with a bonus based on how they change a short term profit margin and they announce "In order to personally make an extra $20,000 I'm firing Alice, Bob, and Carol because their customer opinion surveys don't immeadiately and directly helps the bottom line. Our company's reputation will be damaged in the long run, but my dumb boss didn't make that part of my incentive package. Tough luck for all you guys but vacation in the Bahamas for me!" they're going to incur lots of direct bad will. If they appear clueless as to the long term consequences, obscure the direct benefits to themselves, give credit to their boss for "having vision", and express sympathy to A, B, and C then they just make people grumble about "management in general". Their calculation would go: "Would I rather insult my boss, and have A, B, and C's friends hate me or just nebulously damage company morale a bit more and work in the worsened company?"
It probably isn't even explicitly conscious. The camoflauge gets even better if they *simply don't think about it*. Then they're *actually* clueless and being nice to people to boot. Their beleif in their own mistruths about "the need for reorganization and repurposing our team to accomplish our mission better" will add to the impression that getting revenge isn't likely to be productive.
Based on this kind of reasoning my pragmatic transformation of the initial sentence would be something like:
"Other people are *spending effort* giving the term 'Web 2.0' high 'term recognition' and positive emotional connotations among other business people which means you can use it to rally people who manage or fund 'Internet stuff' (it goes without saying that it shouldn't be used too much with techs who hate bizspeak and will thus be demoralized rather then enthused so don't encourage them to do things like read the prospectus, the business plan, or the company website)."
On the other hand a *better* bizspeak version of the above would be:
"The enthusiastic buzz swirling around Web 2.0 can be leveraged to raise your company's profile and add value to your product."
This is short, hides the effort theft, and ignores the fact that people given instructions like this will have to fill in more blanks than usual because "Web 2.0" is such a nebulous term. Basically, it's useful language for making money by getting people to do stuff.
uurhgh. I feel so dirty.
We keep a wiki with the most up to date phrases in a grid. Just hang around a few high level managers every now and then (my suggestion is about once per month) and you'll hear the new ones. CEO's are also very good for this material.
I'm a regional IT manager for a US-based multi-national. I'm a techie, not a mangler despite my job role. I've resisted the pressure to resort to corporatesque and made sure my guys dont indulge in this verbal wank-fest too. We simply tell it how it is. Over the 6 years I've been with this company, our reputation has been made: if you want a straight answer when the excrement hits the rotating blades, you come see either myself or one of my team.
Sure, it's not "pretty" when some sales/marketing droid is going through the motions of why their latest big idea "leverages core <something> to facilitate <something-else> and yield a high VAR..." and one of my guys simply says "Ok - you've got no idea how you're gonna do this - right we get it. Move on to the next slide please". Still, the C-team (CEO/CFO/CTO/etc) appreciate my team's frankness and they pay our salaries.
Business speak has appearantly invaded your job title as well. What exactly does a "Systems Administrator" do anyway?
It is just an business term that stands for "the person who does whatever we need with comptuers." The same as "IT administrator", "IT Director", "Technology Administrator", "Computer Specialist" or whatever term some suit decided to give it today.
They used to be called Programmers or Computer Scientists.
Corporate speak is basically the same type of "Rah-Rah" speech you here at Amway/Mary Kay/etc conventions.
That's for damned sure! I attended the LinuxWorld Expo in Boston last week and - unlike previous years - it was actually quite a challenge to find anyone willing (or able) to speak in any real detail. Indeed, the reason for such a phenomenon was quite clear: the exposition floor was crawling with company representatives from PR and Marketing, and knowledgeble technicians were, on the whole, those attendees asking the questions. The technical aspect (i.e. the real, worthwhile content) of the exposition has been contaminated with nothing but "corporate speak." **Technical information and performance can be distilled through a proper treatment of words to be well understood by those unacquainted with the details. However, language becomes a barrier for efficient communication when forced into a mode of artificial superficiality and generalization.
This is a message to the business world: Do away with the idiocies of corporate marketing dialogue and provide the information required by interested parties, and you will win more customers than otherwise. Please.
**An example: Early tuesday, just after Intel had finished getting situated, a friend and I sat down for what must have been one of their first presentations. The speaker was clearly an articulate man with many years in one of Intel's engineering divisions -- who had, of course, been elevated to management or marketing. However, while you might think that such experience would be invaluable to present a product, the result was anything but a lucid presentation of Intel's latest and greatest. Visibly uncomfortable, the rep rambled along, spouting an alphabet soup of acronyms intended to convey the latest Intel strategy to provide integrated products in all business areas, from storage and servers to office equipment and web presence. Fifteeen minutes later when the presentation concluded, I still didn't know what the hell he was trying to say other than 'we are planning to make things easier for businesses by making everything work smoothly together.'
Here's a couple of websites that could help you out in the pursuit of managementspeak --> http://members.aol.com/matt999h/bullshit.htm and http://www.ebaumsworld.com/officespace.html. I don't mind folks using terminology for more efficient communication between true peers. But the clueless PHB's that employ the art of B.S. to mask their own incompetence is sadly typical and far too common.
My employer is fond of the phrase "...on a going-forward basis", as in "On a going-forward basis, I think we should use DHL for RMA returns".
I happen to loathe the phrase "...on a going-forward basis". It's an empty phrase, the semantic equivalent of styrofoam packing peanuts.
So, during a slow month at the office, when my employer delved into the most minute details of the business, issuing many "going-forward" proclamations (none of which made much sense or saved more than $20 annually), I devised a plan to wean him from this odious phrase.
First, I'd rephrase his suggestions: "So, from now until the heat death of the universe, we're using DHL for RMAs, right?". Then, I started using the phrase in inappropriate situations: "I think, on a going-forward basis, I'm going to grab some lunch.". Finally, I began responding like the Pharoah's scribe from the old Charlton Heston/Yul Brynner movie The Ten Commandments: "SO IT IS WRITTEN...SO IT SHALL BE DONE!". I would then write the pronouncement on one of the office whiteboards like so: "III - THOU SHALT USE DHL ABOVE ALL OTHER OVERNIGHT SHIPPERS".
Usage of "...on a going forward basis" tapered off from thrice daily to about once or twice a month, a tolerable level for me. Yeah, I could have just asked my boss not to say "...on a going-forward basis", but where's the fun in that? If I wasn't a manipulative bastard I wouldn't be VP Operations right now.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
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
From the page: "Bullfighter is the epoch-defining software that works with Microsoft Word and PowerPoint to help you find and eliminate jargon in your documents. It may look like a little toolbar with three buttons, but it's actually much more. Bullfighter includes a jargon database and an exclusive Bull Composite Index calculator that will allow you to see -- in an actual window, on your PC display, live -- just how bad a document can be."
Space and Computers.
...when you're talking to a 22 yr old 6' party girl about her DUI and refer to it as "actually having some value in her life".
That's what when I knew I had jumped the shark. I'm much better now.
Pass the bong.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Especially for us "geeks," we tend to forget that although people can be analytical, everyone has emotions and emotion is what ultimately drives us to action. That's why there are vacuous terms like "mission-critical" and "value-added," because before they were overused, they actually evoked strong emotions.
Once it was used to describe systems that were mission critical, where failure could lead to significant financial losses, property damage, injuries, or loss of life. Remember the part of the MS Windows EULA about Java?
That's what I call mission critical. Also, that's some world-class snark on Microsoft's part. Java-based weapons systems? Sounds reasonable to me.
But instead of being restricted to, say, the oxygen tanks on Apollo 13 or the software that controlled the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine, the definition of mission critical has been extended to corporate networks. True, there can be financial losses if a corporate network is down or its security is compromised, but significant financial losses?
No, what really happens when the network's down is this: the salesdroids have to work the phones instead of having their noses in Outlook all day (or Solitaire), the CEO is pissed because his niece can't e-mail him pictures of her new kitten, and everyone else is thrown off their routine of chatting on AIM or playing stupid Yahoo! games all day.
Okay, maybe a system whose failure ends up with the whole company massing with torches and pitchforks outside the door to the IT department counts as "mission critical". But I still lament the devaluing of these words.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Business buzzwards are like any other kind of slang. People use it to feel cool. Your peers probably won't notice if you don't use it yourself, but if you try to crusade against it you'll just sound like the person who insists on correcting everybody's grammar. Focus on the substance of what's being said rather than how it's said. One geekly satisfying way that I amuse myself and resist the temptation to mock people for using stupid buzzwords is to think of them as sort of geeky aliens who don't quite know the language.
Exactly, I think this frasmotic misuse of anispeptic jargon should boil the diff gain into the clippers of anyone caught in its compunctuous pericombobulations.
This site is all about those weaselwords. That feeling you have that there is something wrong with this kind of language - go with it.
So how do i tell my boss that im gonna take my sweet ass time on this project when he asks me when it's gonna be done?
I used to get upset about corporate psycho-babble, but it doesn't bother me so much anymore. Over the years, I've seen so many "paradigm shifters", "enterprise enablers", etc. crash in such spectacular ways that when I'm confronted when a particularly slick-tongued buzzword generator, I just smile and get on with it because I know that unless they have substance to back up their style they are just going to end up being someone's lunch.
Eventually the rubber hits the road and woe unto the clueless who end up with treadmarks on their heads.
I use corporate psycho-babble when necessary, but always back up these utterances with hard data. It's useful knowing the language of the enemy.
I on a bet with a friend learned corporate speak and them translated his ideas to corporate speak after he was shot down. He was suprised how many of his ideas got signed off on when I pitched them.
...and we were conquered long ago.
I work for, wait, lets just say its a BIG financial institution that starts with "Bank". Yep. That one.
IT management here was long ago conquered and crushed by entire legions of suits who speak "corp speak". Like death and taxes it is simply inevitable. Get over it or not.
I am starting to think I prefer not. After years of dealing with dolts who use their incredible mastery of this arcane tongue to hide the fact that they ARE dolts I think I have had enough. I can't fight it anymore.
Maybe I will quit to form my own company. I don't know. But if I do I swear to heaven if I EVER hear one of my employees utter words such as: "synergies", "big rocks", or "levelset" I will personally beat them with a garden hose. OK, that would be a bit harsh but you get the idea.
Let me ask you this, is bathing necessary? Oral hygiene? How about washing your clothes? How about not looking and/or dressing like a homeless person when you go to work?
Presentation is VERY important, so important in fact that I'm shocked you'd even have to ask. If you can't present your ideas in a clear and concise way, then you're going to be overrun by others who can. As for the buzzwords, give me a break. A buzzword is a cliche waiting to happen. If your superiors are really swayed by buzzwords then they're either stupendously stupid, or you're just not getting through to them. If its the former, find a new job since you're on a sinking ship. If its the latter then work to improve your communications skills.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Any time you deal with a hierarchy, this situation manifests itself. As people move up the management chain, they become managers of people. No matter whether you're running a nuclear submarine, an IT department, or a high school, you are not managing the actual work. You are managing the people who do the work. By definition, you are becoming more removed from the work itself.
So unless you want to wind up doing all the work yourself, you have to develop methods of getting the people who work below you on the hierarchy to do that work. This is the part that a many, many people in business don't understand, whether they are managers, geeks, or some other breed of corporate denizen. Management is a discipline. I'll say it in a different way, just to be emphatic about it: Just as programmers have to learn how to program, managers have to learn how to manage.
Unfortunately, most people who are put in management positions have little or no training in how to lead people. Imagine if you were thrown into a big development project, and knowing only FORTRAN, you were expected to learn Java on the fly. You might be able to it, if you're sharp and committed, but it would be an extremely painful process. That's the situation most managers in American organizations wind up in. They're busy learning how to manage, and on top of it they're supposed to have some sort of knowledge about the tasks their subordinates perform.
If you look at how much training leaders in the US military receive in leadership skills alone, and compare that to the training corporate leaders receive, the comparison is ludicrous. I'm not suggesting that the sometimes life-and-death conditions of military life are directly analogous to corporate life, but there's a reason officers are heavily recruited when they leave the military. They have not only been trained in how to actually lead people and manage teams; they have also had to learn to do what their subordinates do.
Here's an example: Imagine if the VP of Technology Initiatives at your company actually had to learn how to program in the language you use, then had to spend time programming in that language with the software tools the company programmers use. During that time he would be evaluated by veteran programmers. If he didn't pass their examinations, he would not become the VP of Technology Initiatives. That's how it works with junior officers in the military. An Infantry officer is trained in how to be a grenadier, a light machinegunner, a heavy machinegunner, a vehicle driver, a rifleman, and so on. He gets bossed around by soldiers who have been in for years. He digs a lot of foxholes, gets pushed hard by the veteran NCOs, and in the end, if he fucks up, he doesn't get to lead a platoon.
I'm not suggesting that the business world should spend the time and money that the military does on training, because in most cases it would probably be cost-prohibitive. Plus, why would you train someone with that amount of rigor if you knew they'd leave the company at the first opportunity? The military has the advantage of being able to tie the training to tours of duty for specific lengths.
So we're still left with the original problem. There is a way to create better leaders in a hierarchy, but in many ways it is simply not cost-effective for companies to invest in leadership training. This leaves people who are placed in management positions because of their valuable technical skills in an odd position. They are not, in the main, being trained in management skills, so they have to pick those skills up on the fly. Their colleagues in management don't have the appropriate technical skills. Somehow everyone in the management organization still needs to communicate and try to get things done. The end result is a whole lot of fudging. It's not that people don't want to do things better, but everyone has been thrown into the water without much of a life jacket. It's actually amazing that any company ever busts out of this cycle and develops truly capable manageme
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Suppose Acme Inc. buys widgets and gadgets, and assembles them together into fudgets. Then it offers the fudgets for sale at more than the price of the widgets and gadgets that go into the fudgets. Why should I buy Acme's fudgets, instead of buying widgets and gadgets and making the fudgets myself? Whatever reason there is (if there is one, that is) is the value that Acme has added.
They may know more about fudgets than I do, and thus make a better fudget than I could; they may make a lot more fudgets than I need, and can achieve economies of scale; they may be able to offer me better advice on how to actually use the fudgets; they may absorb some of the risk of defective fudgets through a guarantee or service plans; etc.
A simpler example is compensated middlemen in transactions. Suppose I have a good to sell. How do I find the bidders that offer the best price? I can interrupt all of my other work to go and try to round up potential buyers, but this can be a forbidding task. Or I can go to a person who makes their living from matching sellers with the best bidders for the good in question. The buyer pays more money for the good than what I get, and the middleman pockets the difference; this amount is often called the spread. For this arrangement to work, the amount of the sale price that the middleman takes must be less than what it would have cost me to find the best bidder on my own. Or, in other words, the middleman's spread can only be rationally justified if he actually adds value to the transaction.
Are you adequate?
I have worked as a professional educator and "eduspeak" is exactly like "corporate speak."
:-\
"Risk averse" seems to explain it quite well - it's basically a way of being really, really nice when speaking about students who may occassionally encounter cognitive challenges when attempting to complete their coursework.
I don't think eduspeak is *all* bad; it's basically an expression of the belief that all students are worthwhile human beings, and that all people need each other.
The problem comes when you build up a child's self esteem too much. I worked in a school where 100 was good, 99 was ok, and 98 was perceived as "failure" to many students. My fear is that when they finally do ever encounter a genuine difficulty in life, they are going to fall apart.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Fear is the mind killer.
A guilty conscience means at least you've got one.
I guess the short answer is: Yes, corporate speak is necessary. My former boss compared a pitch to proposing to your girlfriend. Would you wrap an engagment ring in an old newspaper and just leave it out for her to find? Would you ask her for her hand in marriage while wearing your sweats?
No, that would not be very romantic. You want to take her out to a nice place to eat dressed up, present the ring while on a knee and have it in a nice box, maybe even wrapped in a nice ribbon.
Presenting any proposal to a group of your superiors is a bit like that. Not only do you want to have a good idea but you want to be able to sell it. The right words, the right time, and the right appearance will all help you to sell your idea.
I have a strong dislike for terms like "Best Practices" and "synergy" but I manage to keep from gagging when I use 'em (and I do, but as little as possible). My current bosses like what they call "solid numbers" which are really hard to come by when you are trying to convince them that they need to spend money on something like spyware detection. How can I give them hard numbers on the money we can save if we prevent a theft of information that leads to a loss? How many millions could we lose if spyware captured information that could lead to their accessing one of our bank accounts (say the one that is used for payroll for thousands of people)? The obvious answer is millions but the hard numbers answer is impossible to come by.
It all leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. It is a game that must be played by "their" rules even when you don't agree with them or know all of them. As an IT person, you are occasionally a salesperson for your team. When that role falls on your shoulders, you have to take the good with the bad and just do your best.
There are some words that are important to use very infrequently - they have so much power that they are like pulling out a handgun. Use them very infrequently and only when all other words have been used and found to be too weak. Those words are "Ethically" "Morally" and most importantly "Fiduciary Responsibility." They are words that reach down into the core of the manager's and director's souls (VP's don't have souls).
The same goes for "leverage"; just say "use" instead. Please?
-Kurt
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
I hear lots of funny words and abbreviations and it sometimes seems like people are just throwing them around to sound impressive. Do I really have to learn all this funny language? Is this just something that I should expect as I become more technical?
Someone recently said to me:
Do I really have to learn all those terms?
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Law 4
Always Say Less than Necessary
Law 9
Win through your Actions, Never through Argument
More laws and their details can be found here and here. .
An average executive could go on and on about their qualifications, but nothing they succeed at is actually hard and most of what they fail at is actually easy.
....the show is good for laughs though. Funnier than the American version of "The Office".
If anyone has any doubt, watch The Apprentice. It's as much an exposé of some of the most egotistical and juvenile nincompoops that clutter management at virtually every level in RL that your likely to find on television.
ALL of those people sound impressive on paper. In person they are 12 year-olds in expensive suits.
Sure, an effective and savvy person usually stands out by the end of the season, and one certainly can't argue that Donald Trump and his associates don't have a clue, but IMHO the average "contestant" is a total waste.
---
I post anonymously because I still can.
I work for a small nonprofit. Our corporate speak consists of obscenities. The farther up the heirarchy the more you hear.
I find "Corporate Speak" is most often used by people with nothing useful to say. The same folks usually spend hours on power point presentations when a simple email would do.
My advise is if your boss values such useless wastes of time find a new boss. If you are the boss tell them: Could you repeat that but use english this time.
"Corporate speak" in technical companies is often due to the speaker not having much understanding of the technology, and not wanting to learn.
Corp speak is also used when the person being addressed does not have much understanding of the technology, and does not want to learn.
The problem starts with nepotism and cronyism.
Try designing PCBs, silicon layouts, microprocessor architecture, and writing drivers/OS code. That's a technical background, not figuring out the best way to distribute the latest Ubuntu patches to the 40 workstations you admin.
Most of you by now have heard one of management's favorite phrases: "root cause"
/.'er souls out there hear this phrase being used for than a few times a week!?
For those fortunate enough not to have heard it a billion times, here is a wiki page to fill you in.
Lucky for me, I've only had to hear this during some conference calls or when the shit hits the fan on a production system, which forces management to go into damage control mode until the smoke clears (ie. We are doing our best to determine the root cause of why the server spontaneously combusted. LMAO!!)
How many poor
May you one day have the power to Jedi Mind Trick(tm) these morons into being upfront with their employees!! muhahahaha!
Operators are standing by for your Death Star Powered(tm) replies...
>These are actually pretty powerful terms, and it's important to have a common vocabulary that can be used >when bringing together managers from varying fields like sales, IT, operations, finance, etc.
As long as you are using terms which mean something, sure. However, when using terms simply to sound "good" bothers me. Sadly, the use of terms like this is rampant. The thing that bothers me the most is when it actually takes AWAY from the point.
As an example of lingo diminishing the quality of communication, I overheard someone (same management level I am, though much cozier with the CFO-level folks than I am since he speaks the lingo) talking to someone on the phone about our company. We, as part of our articulated (and actually lived) corporate culture, like to think we are, to some extent, helping make the world a better place while being a viable commercial entity. This person, however, referred to our company as a "play" between industry X and industry Y. Sure, we intersect multiple industries. Sure, we are a for-profit company. However, we are not a "play." What this person did was miscommunicate what our company was all about because it was more convenient to use lingo. Assuming that part of his goal in having the conversation he was having was for the other person to understand what we do, he failed.
Buzzwords become invented whenever someone is so proud of their idea that it requires an ineloquent term to sumamrize it, tone it down, or otherwise disguise and dull the idea. Never mind that this idea is obvious to anyone who knows what they are talking about.
Examples:
Deliverables - this is used to emphasize that results are desired, not partial completion. People used to call this "results." You know, like "I want RESULTS, Steve!" Now it's replaced with a smug manager talking about "deliverables."
Solutions - this used to be called "services" or whichever verb described what you were actually doing. This is great because it reminds me of a swear word - you can just use it as a crutch instead of figuring out what you really want to say.
Mission Critical - this used to be "critical" or just "really important." Now the manager gets to pretend he's on the Apollo 13 Mission Control team rallying to get the boys home. If someone says this, they are most likely contemplating saying "Failure is not an option" next.
Buzzwords make us puke because they are disguising, globbing, dressing up, or otherwise obscuring perfectly good, straightforward language. Sometimes it's to make things happy-feely ('fired' -> 'terminated' -> 'let go', 'laid off' -> 'downsized' -> 'restructured', 'crippled' -> 'disabled' -> 'physically challenged'), sometimes it's done to escape connotations of the normal word ('results' vs 'deliverables'), but we abhor these kinds of things because they are not rigorous. Legalese is related, but legalese is far too rigorous. (Although a lawyer would love to confuse people like c-speak has.)
Jargon is a different beast - it introduces words where there was truly no word to represent the concept, or it introduces words that add a connotation (hatred, approval, or even fun) to previous words. The difference between this and c-speak is that the listener understands these connotations fully. c-speak is inherently deceptive because it denies connections with previous words ("no, you weren't laid off, we just restructured!"). Eventually c-speak might be introduced into English, but by then it is generally used without said deception (see opportunity, disabled). That's why new ones have to be invented all the time, because they have lost their disguise.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
I have long cringed at the sound of a buzz word or phrase when used to 'guide' me or 'encourage' me. I developed a tactic for 'giving it back to the man.' I simply take the buzz word and convert it with a thesarus and put it up high on every dry erase board I come across. It took a little time for the masses to figure it out but once they did the buzz word or phrase became open joke even among management thus killing its appeal to its creator. I think for me the scary part is when one of the translations becomes appealing and then I become one of 'them'..... wait this isn't good!
It makes no sense if you think about it. At the end of which day? It doesn't imply today. It implies sometime in the future, near or far. The sad part is that people use it because everyone else is using it, and they have no idea how to use it.
So, I ask them, "At the end of which day?" This annoys the person because now he/she has to explain the term to me. It's rather hilarious hearing their explanation.
"Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance." -- Hendrik Willem Van Loon
I have this habit or actually i love speaking in simple terms. The main aim of my communications is making the other person understand. Now i am freelance webdesigner. When i talk with my clients and simplify things down for them they go like..."ah its so simple..". Then they ask me for discounts and they get extra smart trying to suggest absurd things. Then i just put so much of technical jargon on their pea sized brain that they just shut up and say OK. They dont want to show they did not understand. Another instance i was sitting with 4 friends and one guy a wannabe geek, but doesnt know bullshit. We are having a discussion about linux and windows and he was saying that linux is dead commercially and no major companies are using linux. So i was making my point in simple english as there were 3 more friends who are totally non-technical except for one who had done a master in computer application(funnily he doesnt know how to copy in dos when i asked him to once). Now this guy has actually heard the words the wannabe geek was using. He has only heard the words but doesnt know the meaning. In the end i just gave up the argument as the wannabe geek was just taking all the technical jargon he knew and making sentences out of it. So later my friend (the dos illiterate masters in computer application) tell with a smirk you lost it with that guy finally you met your match. I was like the guy is talking bullshit. Then i kept quite i mean this guy was supposed to be my friend and he was so happy that i "finally met my match" But that is what language can do and i use it many times to get my way not with close friends though
You can blame this hogwash language on the MBAs out there, who are taught to speak in this purile form. Rest assured, the king has no clothes when it comes to this. One December day during my last year at university I was chatting with a librarian I know when a guy came up to her and said: 'Im an MBA.. I have a paper due in a week... How do I get started?'
OK the guy was probably in the special business mba program where you can enter provided you have an equivalent amount of experience in the workforce. Back to the topic as on SD... this language is for people who dont acutally do any work, they dont know anything but make themselves sound important. Just like selling religion, clowns in suits who pimp this pablum are selling something so mystical nobody can understand it... and if we cant understand it, it must be genius... the weak and insecure fall for this act... Its really doublespeak to keep our focus off the really important things, like the bottom line, like who is or isnt on your team to actually do the real work, or like who is getting paid for doing nothing.
Fight it if you can, if it's taken over, adapt. It's just like in a game.
If you were playing oblivion, and you're used to FPS like Doom 3, you'd learn how to play, right? or would you get pissed off and write bad reviews and write to slashdot that Oblivion isn't doom 3 and therefore sucks.
But, if you can resist, do it. But don't be stupid about it.
I have to agree we need to fight. We are not alone in battling corporate-speak. Check out http://www.fightthebull.com.
...speak in a phony language. phony language for phony people.
what did i do? i sent from employee to consultant and focused on learning new skills to start my own business. it has been a great opportunity, although, i haven't gone out on my own just yet - still consulting.
i'm so disgusted with these types of people i don't want to spend any time even discussing these loasers.
"dna company."
no, you moron, that's your dna on the company logo pictured on your screen. doh!
For about the first 5 years of my IT career (which now spans about 15 years and now has me in a non-technical position managing a corporate program), I was able to get by without knowing much about the business my employer was in, and just fiddle around and play with IT systems.
As you move up the corporate ladder and gain responsibility, it becomes necessary to speak the language of business. If you are unable to explain why an IT solution is a good solution in terms that business people can understand, you won't be successful.
But IT people in business positions who can speak to the business so they can be understood can do very well. I just recently had an experience in my current "program management" position where I needed a system implemented. I was able to describe to IS&T in explicit detail exactly what my requirements were, and they were able to implement the system I needed in about 2 weeks. I got thanks from both the implementor and his director for being able to articulate what it was that I needed, because they get a lot of requests from non-technical people and spend a lot of time spinning their wheels just trying to understand the requirements.
The best of both worlds - having business people understand you so you can implement things you believe are the right thing to implement, and being able to speak about the technology to the IT folks - can take you a long ways, unless your goal is to always be a tech and have the business tell you what to implement.
You still have to put up with things like "decision alignment" (a big one on my team) and such, but in the end it's not so bad. Having the respect of your business is one way to ensure future employment/employability as well, and it makes a hell of a resume point.
It also helps to be able to speak the language of business when a vendor comes in and tries to snow your company - it helps you see through the corporatespeak BS that a lot of vendor salespeople bring into your CIO/CTO and explain to the decision makers why it's BS.
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
We still say stuff like "The thing with the flashing light needs to be fixed" and "The moving thing on that page that stateless page need to be changed to work with the progamming language in the browser that calls back to the main computer for more information." I mean, it takes a little longer to describe but at least we're not confused by buzz-words and stuff.
..for management. I'd like to call it 'Bizzonics(tm)'
Master the jargon and then rip it appart. Embrace, extend...
I have to mow the lawn and a bunch of other 'opportunities for growth' this weekend. I think I'm going to 'realign' a few trees in the yard it's getting crouded.. etc etc.
It's a great way to point out the absurdity without confronting it.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
If it is all marketdroid buzzwords you should probably start looking for another employer, your department just got borged and projects will start failing. The buzzwords are being used to fool clients into paying a lot more money than they should, based on some simple tech and some slick graphic design probably. Then the smirking marketdroids will get on your case to do impossible things while pointing to their pseudologic which has absolutely no foundation or referents to reality and physical processes as known by mankind. There is no chance that you will be able to convince someone without a brain that he does not in fact have one. Your fault is in being honest and enthusiastic, while hoping to do a good, responsible job despite the presence of droids above you in the organization. Possible reactions include 1) resume writing 2) BOF tactics 3) lateral move within organization 4) do minimum and wait to get canned when they screw up 5) offer to be skewered and rotisseried at medium heat. Or possibly if it is not clear they will win, 6) do what you are told while putting 5PM, overtime and ownership of your own work into the contract.
YES IT IS. I hate it but its true.
I had the unfortunate experience of sitting on a crowded bus next to a 'Hoxton Media Boy' (Londoners will know what I mean) - who was on the phone to mates. The language he was using was amazing - it was straight out of an IT management office, but the meaning was wholly different.
"Yer, I am going to upload to a bar tonight and just idle. Haven't had a one to one with Jamie for ages - he has been down and off the ping map for a while. My uptime has been crazy recently - I just need to power down and recharge. I might check out a movie tonight with Katy - as long as we are in sync. It seems like recently all the interfacing with her is just off stream - we just can't seem to open a fully duplexed channel"
And so it went on... Horrible - just horrible.
Excellend analogy! And the emperor is stupid enough to buy them, and "reorganizes" the tailors that really made them in the first place! <cue star wars imperial march>
Next week: how to erect near borders while holding high the flag of a borderless world.
Say no to software patents.
TCP/IP? What does that mean?
Ah yess : Transient Corporate Parleance / Intellectual Pretentiousness ??
www.cluetrain.com
There is a big difference between field/industry specific "technical" jargon and buzzwords. The former is NOT obfuscation at all.
Myocardial Infarction has a fairly specific meaning, and is very useful for _concisely_ conveying that meaning to medics. Whereas saying someone has a heart problem isn't specific enough.
Same goes when you are saying a benchmark is an OLAP benchmark and another is an OLTP benchmark to some IT guy.
Whereas when those people say something like "leveraging disintermediation paradigms" they are usually using a lot to say very little.
I wouldn't even say it's the difference between info compression and info decompression, because often with business buzzwords, there is very little info.
To me it's more like these people are expected to open their mouths and move them. But they know the more they actually say, the more they'd get in trouble (either because they don't really know much, or because they don't want to be pinned down on what they say later on), so they have to talk and say nothing much. Same for printed material - they have to fill column inches of a PR release or press interview.
There's a significant difference between saying someone has Chronic Myeloid Leukemia, vs Acute Myeloid Leukemia.
Whereas AFAIK there is very little difference in practice between:
"envisioneer compelling synergies" and "architect impactful initiatives".
Everyone with sense just watches what the person saying that sort of stuff actually _does_ after that. e.g. who gets sacked, who gets promoted, who gets dead-ended, and what policies change.
And none of that might actually be related to what was said.
Don't forget something can be mission critical in a non-critical mission.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
In any meeting, note your action points, and be careful not to throw the babies in the water. If there is meeting when the department has a 'challenge' , try blame stroming in a small group first. Never put short time priorities before business development, running break even is not what the company was setup for. Resist corporate annorexia when the manager cannot come up with a detailed financial calculation.
Start a progressively proactive and extensible trend. Instead of using transparent, out-of-the-box corporate speak, repurpose and introduce yourself to the collaborating and integrated end-to-end community in the following best-in-class, ROI-maximized manner: "I'm the IT guy, b*tch."
When people used this kind of 'speak', whether it is techspeak or corporate speak or whatever, I suspect it simply is an attempt to cover their incompetence. It is a sort of general waffling around; if you really know what you are talking about, you will simply say it. Why would a manager say 'realignment' instead of 'firing people'? Simply because he is afraid; insecure, simply, maybe bad conscience. Think about it - if you manage a company and you realize that you actually have to fire some people, and you really feel this is the right thing to do; wouldn't you simply say something like 'This is our situation - I have to fire x people. I hate it as much as anybody, but we have to do it. We will go about it like this ...'?
As for whether you have to talk like the suits - I don't know. I certainly know I wouldn't do it; being competent and speaking clearly are two of the fundamental values in my view of the world, and also the main reasons for my career success.
People who use 'management speak' contribute nothing to the business.
Such people should be fired immediately. Their nonsense-speak is little more than an attempt to cover up their own lack of useful function, and their own lack of competence. There is no point in talking in a language that is not concise, precise, and that other people can understand.
A person whithout a solid background in the area that they are managing is not a useful manager. This has proven repeatedly in American and British business, yet companies still appoint 'professional' managers who have studied 'management science'.
Management is about understanding what your people are doing, delegating reasonable tasks to meet corporate aims, managing resources, and making sure that they people are happy with doing the set tasks.
Management is not about applying some management philosophy invented for 'management science' courses. People that have been subjected to these courses usually appear brain damaged to normal workers, and usually sink the business long term by generating unhappiness and a general impression that the business is being run by morons. Anyone with reasonable personal skills, and normal levels of rationality and intelligent can manage. There is no need to hire in imcompetent fools to boost the bottom line in the short term by making cuts that then hit long term competitiveness.
One good thing about corporate speak is that it's a neutral common ground that just about everyone can agree on without interfering with any domain space issues of the actual businesses themselves. I still don't really like it but it goes over much better than tech jargon when I'm talking to managers and clients and just about anyone else not working in software development. If your job is hidden from the contextual relevance of what you're facilitating (through support or implementation or whatever else) then it might not be very useful
Half the world is going to call this a flame, but it is strictly my opinion, so mod me down if you want, but it won't hurt my feelings...
Now, for how I feel; you can shove your corporate speak up your ass.
People can make the falacious arguement that techno speak is the same thing, but it is not. Asshole system admins often use it in the same manner, but they are devoid of intellegence, and are as expendable as most humans in management positions.
Groups (whether they are composed of developers, network administrators/engineers, sysadmins etc.) that converse intelligently using terms related to technology often need to do so to design and implement systems properly. These people should NOT be trying to fling these terms at management in order to keep them uninvolved. Doing so to mask your own incompetence, steer them into making the decisions you want, or otherwise deceive them is completely wrong. Someone in this profession should most definately have the skills required to take what they know in the terms of technology and break it down in a way that management will understand. Give them as much knowledge as they need, in a way that they can understand it, so that they can make informed decisions, ask intelligent questions related to the project/problem at hand, and perform their job to the best of their ability. In terms of management that usually means that the job gets done in the way that most benefits the company. In my previous job, I was frequently used to 'translate' between sysadmins and developers, or between Windows sysadmins and *nix sysadmins (and so on), because they could not understand each others little worlds. My nature as a computer hobbyist and enthusiast has led me down each of these roads to at least a certain extent, so that by no means an expert in most of them, I can at least understand what Joe Unix Admin is trying to say to Bob Windows Admin. If these people cannot even talk to each other (which I consider very distressing), how can they even remotely expect to communicate with management...
Corporate buzz words on the other hand are a pile of smoldering bullshit. touch base? blip on the radar? total cost of ownership? put the ball in their court? mission critical? synergy? bleeding edge? think outside the box? out of the loop?
Right. What a crock of shit. Dealing with corporate types and their eternal lines of shit drove me from the professional field. I now happily go to school for computer science and engineering. It will probably remain an expensive hobby forever. My new job permits me to voice my opinions much more freely. My fellow Marines aren't necessarily the brightest bunch, but none of them are remotely afraid of telling me how it really is (in plain english.) And they aren't afraid to hear how it is from me either. There is something to be envied in that. And as far as I know the only term above that I hear is 'mission critical', because we cannot accomplish our units mission without certain equipment. But then we actually carry out missions. Companies make profits... calling it a mission seems silly after you've been on this side.
You need to realise that people higher up in the company have a different perspective on things than you. A wider perspective. That influences the lingo.
In 30's Alfred Korzybski laid foundation for General Semantics ...
In early 70's Richard Bandler (programmer!) and John Grinder (psychologist) started development of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
Since then NLP evolved and was applied in many areas. Big Corporations were among main clients of NLP-masters. Other clients: (...There were many of them, for sure!...).
Hidden (for near everybody) technology took world under the hook. Look at ever-smiling politics, hear what about they say ... really.
Now, 10 years after M. Hall developed neurosemantics, more of this technology is available for "people" (and, I suppose, with less objections which might arose around NLP).
Mind control, which is obvious application of NLP, should be recognizable by everybody - especially citizens of "democratic" countries...
Of a system architect actually is being able to speak both languages and do the translation. At least that's what it meant for me. Or even I got the position because I was able to translate.
if you really cannot cope with the C-Speak, maybe you don't want to climb the coorperate ladder, maybe the "Peter priciple" applies to you (it's a book, look it up, amusing and the guy has a point).
One company I worked for had a swearbox, into which you had to pay if you said certain words such as "paradigm"!
The best top level managers I've met are plain spoken people.
They are masterful communicators that never use corporate double talk.
They hire a P.R. guy to make press releases with corporate talk.
What do you think happens in a non-English-speaking country, when your boss, whose native language is clearly not English, speaks too much English in meetings ?
They just tend to insert random English words in every sentence, 50% of the time, pronounced badly, sometimes, at the wrong moment.
It's just pathetic. On the bright side, though, it makes for interesting meetings if you try to track every word that shouldn't have been pronounced, and compare your list with your colleagues. Business loto, anyone ?
Example in French: Le quality man fait la glue entre les différents business types.
Simon it should be you're not your. As in your excellent message is lost because you're not presenting it well.
This problem isn't new.
"A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself."
- Disraeli, on Gladstone, 1878
"More matter, with less art!"
- Gertrude. Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2, by William Shakespere, 16th century
May the Maths Be with you!
This is just the kind of synergistic, customer-centric, upsell-driven, out-of-the-box, customizable, strategically tactical, best-of-breed thought leadership that will help our clients track to true north. Let's fly this up the flagpole and see where the pushback is.
Meat is murder, I eat chicken.
Use this mindless corporate drivel against itself. Punish GroupSpeak users by introducing known "concepts" but implying incorrect values to them. Intentionally use them in related, but inconsistent ways to obscure meaning. And use hybrid-speak frequently. BlueTooth becomes BlueTube & so forth. They deserve it...
Relax... You're soaking in it." -Madge
You can see just about every new corporate fad that hits your office as it roles off the press. You can get it for free just by breathing. You can see where they come up with their hair-brained ideas. And who knows, if you are in the right position, you might be able to point out that the latest fad works great for company X profiled in the Magazine, but doesn't fit your companies specific needs.
Warns Master Yoda you ...
The problem usually starts with an MSCE and ends with an MBA.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
(n/t)
This was actually said by a manager at one of our meetings.
"We're looking to ramp up our knowledge capital until we achieve critical mass, moving forward."
I wrote in my notebook for posterity.
http://www.weaselwords.com.au/words.htm
I feel like unless one studies and masters the use of these pretentious buzzwords and phrases, he/she will be run over by people with worse ideas but a nicer-sounding delivery. Is corporate speak a necessary evil?
Yes, corporate speak is a necessary evil and yes, unless you master the use of these phrases you WILL be run over by your more astute comrades.
Each major department in a corporation, such as marketing, management, IT, etc - has its own dialect and way of communicating concepts and ideas. At the IT level, precision is valued and useful. At the corporate/management level, the ability to convey large concepts in shorthand terms or to tone down specific bad news with obfuscating phraseology is useful. The language depends on the job involved. As a quick example, the reason why most corporations have project managers and insist that it be only the project manager that communicates with the client is that the PM knows how to communicate with the client in ways that will not jeopordize the contract. An IT weenie might blurt out that "you need to immediately buy 20 more servers or this won't work", whereas the PM knows that in most cases any contractual change issues must absolutely be approached with care and require much softer language, giving the client time to mentally adjust to the new reality of spending a bunch more money, etc.
The people with the most job security in a corporation are the multilingual people that know exactly how to convey ideas between departments. When marketing starts spouting Web 2.0 or the need to leapfrog the competition, and you take that back to IT and tell them that marketing wants the background color of the website changed ASAP (and marketing is happy as a result), you have now become valuable to both marketing and IT as someone that can perform translations - i.e. someone critical to the smooth operation of the company.
The more dialects you learn to speak, the more critical you become, and it now becomes real easy to leverage that pay raise.
Just remember to use that everywhere the word "me" should go (my personal pet peeve).
My prior boss at a lrage department within a State University was taken the the concept of XML many years ago when it first became a popular buzzword. "We've got to make everything XML!" he was often heard to say, and relishes the chances to demonstrate his knowledge of the term around higher-ups. As a result, all of the content for the web pages we were working on became text files in various folders. Some held one piece of data, some held hundreds. He essentially re-created the database using the folder tree as relationships. For this, he was promoted, and later stolen away by another company. I was left to maintain the sea of non-standard xml files of various names, and no-one listened to me because I obviously didn't undersatnd XML.
The real problem isn't the corporate speak itself, it's all of the euphamisims mixed into it. Those can be recognized by btheir rate of replacement. For example, fire becomes layoff becomes downsize becomes rightsize.
In other words, so many corporations and their managers have lied, cheated, and stolen so often that the very language they speak has fallen into disrepute.
For those of you new to the corporate language, this is the ultimate corporate speak dictionary (clean version):
... = I do not think you can do this alone
1)I think we are badly coordinated = We are screwing things up
2)I have a different perspective = You are so wrong
3)If you like, we can do this = Do not change it or I'll kill you
4)It would be very frustrating = You will upset me
5)I think we are talking about the same = Shut up your big mouth
6)I do not think it would look nice like that = This is crappy
7)Do a quick and dirty = Quickly because they are awaiting us!
8)I think is a semantic problem = you are taking pure BS
9)We can come back at that later = Can't you see I am busy?
10)This is a draft = It is not pretty but it works
11)Estimate this = Just give me a wild guess
12)Coordinate your efforts with
13)I will think loudly = I am going to say a bunch of stupid things
14)I think your point is valid but = Are you kidding me?
15)I will exaggerate this = Let me explain it in 3 year old terms
16)Didn't you receive my e-mail? = F*** I forgot about this
17)You went over budget = Stop going to the strip joint
18)It will be ready tomorrow = I will be up all night
19)To conclude = Let get the Heck out of here
It is what it isn't. The bottom line is, when we've drawn a line in the sand and the sand has blown away and the line isn't there more, and the situation on the ground is about the same as the situation suspended 300 feet in the air, well, at the end of the day we should all go home.
There's a significant difference between saying someone has Chronic Myeloid Leukemia, vs Acute Myeloid Leukemia.
Around here, we refer to both of those as "Opportunities for Synergistic Patient-Doctor Care Interaction."
Precision is critical. Nonsense-crap like this accomplishes nothing except to hide the actual facts.
Necessary evil? - no.
To climb the corporate ladder? - yes.
Buisness speek mixed with IT jargon, mixed with government anachronisms. Thats my job.
I remember this one meeting (it was a SCIM (pronounced like skim milk though of course) meeting, see they even use anachoranisms for meething names! I know the last two are Information Managment, S is probably service, anyway lame). I I found myself at mid meeting trying I VERY hardest not to laugh out loud, as it was just so silly and absurd. It really was a different language they were speaking. Mix in the usual IT anachornisms, like IT, IIS, html, cpu, ATA, etc... add a dab of Government sections like, ITSB, SSB, OSS, etc... then some programs like, LIDS, OLID, etc... then add some applications names, NRVIS, LIS, etc... then add some OTHER buisness names like BLT, etc.... and finally as a coup de grace start spouting sentances that make no sense like "thats a straw dog" and other phrases that are useless. Mix this up with a healthy dose of nomal biz-speak with words like "action items" and "synergy" (which I think is my least favorite word in the enitre world, as soon as someome utters that word at me, I assume whatever else follows is total bullshit, and disregard whatever that person says), or proactive, deliverables, realign, horizontal this and vertical that, blah blah blah..... Now mix that all together and puke it out for a 3 hour meeting, and wonder how you are still sane.
Thats my rant.
on a side note, I got a email from a friend at work, it only consisted of 3 sentances. It contained over 17 anachronisms. I did LOL for that one. The scary thing was that she wasn't trying to be funny.
Most of this corporate gibbering and drooling is really nothing more than a distasteful variation of a theme derived from Orwellian Doublespeak. All one must do is listen to a George Carlin routine to really get an understanding of how we manipulate words to lessen or eliminate the negative impact. The purpose is, of course, is the adumbration of the negative points of a given topic. One of the concepts of "selling" is getting around the buyer's misgivings. This is accomplished by burying the question in a mire of buzzwords and ding-a-lingo so that the misgiving can never be voiced. I won't delve into the many ways an employee can get "canned" in corporate dildo-speak.
That aside I am reminded of the remarks of a respected anthropology professor I studied under some years ago. One of his first lessons was to impress upon us that every profession has its own unique vocabulary and that the wise would learn that profession's vocabulary if they wished to communicate with their peers. He maintained that the greatest part of mastering a profession was mastering its vocabulary. As the business world involves more babbling than actually doing, more deferring blame than accepting responsibility then one must conclude his statements to be true.
Now one could argue that an anthropological vocabulary actually has more meaning than a corporate vocabulary and they'd probably be right. However, we aren't arguing the legitimacy of the argot but rather the wisdom in investing in it. Considering the IT sector has devolved into technical slaves toiling away for the corporate plutocrats you've been handed a unique opportunity to tip the scale in our (the IT geeks) favor as well as advance your career simultaneously. Learn to "talk the talk" while walking your own walk. Learn to communicate with these high-dollar cutpurses in their own language, thus ingratiating yourself to them. This way, you see past the lies and obfuscation and hopefully can more effectively cut to the heart of the issue. If you are fortunate it will make you appear to be "part of the corporate culture, a "team player" and also be the one guy who is known for getting things done. Just don't forget to blow your own horn.
If you fear that this approach might "eat your brain" like a cancer remember this. When you were a kid you most likely learned a great many obscenities that you used in casual conversation with your friends but somehow managed to automatically and unconsciously censor yourself around your parents. You may have to call upon that same mechanism to avoid "entering into a dialog" and "minimizing risk" in your everyday social life. But it can be done.
Or do look at it another way. We "geeks" tend to have something of an (not necessarily erroneous) inflated intellectual opinion of ourselves, especially when compared against our corporate masters. If this is true then we should have little trouble mastering their silly little pidgin and translating the bs into an efficient productive tongue. Pride yourself on being an effective translator. Though its not likely to get you a position at the UN it is something that is needed in today's dysfunctional corporate economy.
Hell, maybe you could compile a lexicon for the rest of us.
"09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0"
"I am going from a straight system administration role to more of a high-level systems architect for a mid-sized company"
An Architect is a person who designs buildings. Why do people feel that their jobtitle is so important. What's wrong with 'Programmer', or even 'Software Developer'? You're playing their game already.
I almost feel as if I've hit a time warp into the 80's.
Newsflash, corporate speech died around the time we all started to make casual Friday's everyday wear. Every industry has its own terminology and you should be aware of that, but the task of IT is to explain to partnerships or management what they have, what they need, how best to use it and what should be done to protect it, in words that everyone, regardless to technological experience can understand. To many times I've seen blog catch phrases used to project knowledge that frankly was not there.
"Humans are considered to be primitive, the third smartest species on Earth"
Disagree. Whether "deliverable" is an adjective or noun, its use in day-to-day communication within IT (or other industries) is pretty clear: "This is what should 'be' by so and so a day."
./'ers are geeks, and geeks tend to think corporate types are evil. (They say behind their desks and near their empty cans of Diet Coke.) But to simplify a whole sublanguage under a single umbrella is hopelessly ignorant.
And it's not limited to products.
Deliverable implies: "finished programs," "documents," "timelines," "schedule" -- anything that can be "delivered" from one person to another.
Consider an Oracle engineering project. Say, a physical standby configuration.
The three deliverables might be:
- Completed setup of and fully functional standby system.
- Documentation on the configuration.
- Utilities for automated management of the standby.
"products" doesn't quite capture it. "programs" certainly doesn't (documentation is not a program). "Items" -- perhaps, but again, seems to imply something physical. "Things that need to be done and/or functional" is wordy.
I know,
I'm not say there isn't such a thing as "buzzword" -- or obscure, wordy language in general, particularly that meant to hide ignorance; this goes back to the sophists, folks. (See Protagarus. Also see Strunk's Elements of Style.) But "deliverable" doesn't belong to the buzzword category.
Adopting the vernacular is a big part of assimilation into a linguistic community. If you want to be identified as part of the community, your language should say, "I identify with you," and "I'm not unlike you," instead of "I think you're stupid."
Depends on your goals, really. If you want to stick to your no-BS values, by all means do so. But your language engenders your identity in large part. Be mindful of the frames you invoke.
Effective strategy:
Decide where you want to be in the company; adopt the language and dress of that department or those executives; watch the golf invitations flow.
---
All your old jokes are belong to sigs.
I found that meetings that used jargon were far more efficient than the meetings that didn't.
Color me military school, but what I don't get about meetings is why they are needed in a corporate world?
Most of the companies I have worked for (except the really small ones) don't have meetings. It is basically a top down approach.
The management basically doesn't take input from anyone other than informal email and anonymous drop boxes and the only meetings we have are one on one quarterly reviews with our manager.
99% of our other time is spent working independently. We basically show our work in what we accomplish and not what we have claimed to accomplish in the meetings. (Of course our work is easily measured in metrics and in tasks accomplished and logs)
Anything that needs to be said or communicated to higher management is communicated right then and there in person. Strategies are not formed on the lower level and they do not ask for our input in meetings.
Sure this is kind of autocratic, but businesses aren't democracy... And there is no reason a business cannot function without meetings. Just divide up people into groups of 8-10 (standard military unit) and assign a "squad" leader (no manager type of person who holds similar responsibilities as those under him/her). Those members communicate immediate needs and problems to that "squad" leader and they in turn communicate directly to higher ups and so on in a chain of command.
This way... Work can be done independently and without wasting times in long meetings which information could have just been distributed by email.
Well... If you can't work independently and without constant direction then... Maybe meetings are the only way to go, but of course many companies these days require their employees to be able to work on and take own initiative when accomplishing tasking.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Just like (misused) xml it makes people look productive without needing to be productive. Avoid using it at all costs, in conversations rephrase it in normal language before agreeing/disagreeing, and in general make everyone be explicit about what they mean. As long as you are able to get valuable work done and always ask for clarification "so everyone is on the same page" no one will really be able to object, and eventually people will just stop so they don't have to constantly repeat themselves.
Slashdot: Where anecdotes and generalizations can be freely substituted for facts, logic, or intelligence
Agreed. It doesn't have to be a product offered to a customer. "Project", "task", and "assignment" all work perfectly well, and are in fact more precise.
I'm not saying that this is universally true, but where I work it seems that corp-speak is used to compensate for poor vocabulary skills. Most of the management types here simply aren't articulate enough to communicate effectively, even using plain language.
Their written communication skills are even worse than their oral communication skills. I've received e-mail messages from upper-level managers that had such bad grammar that I genuinely couldn't tell what they were trying to convey.
This is not to say that my IT cohorts are significantly better.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
Corporate speak isn't fundamentally differrent from computer speak, and yes you do need both if you are going to get a role that is "corporate" or interfaces with "corporate".
Management is a real area of expertese. With its own jargon.
Like any technical jargon. It has its place its good to communicate between
people of the same "tribe" and helps people express goals very well. There is
not a lot of difference between talking about "Inversion of Control" or something
like that or talking about say "commodization". Both are idioms. They express
a lot to a audience that understands them.
This is what is also "bad" about technical jargon as well. The real world is complex and idioms are efficent sometimes, but inpeneterable when talking to other "tribes". I can't even talk to windows people with the same set of technical jargon, because some words have subtly different meanings. For instance, some PKI policy even acronyms _overlap_ with PKI technical acronyms!
The bottom line is you need to understand your bosses, customers, clients, ect...
Ideally that means being conversent with _each_ technical jargon.
Garick
Fighting is good and would prevail in a company based on fundamentally 'genuine' principles. But what of a company that is rotten in it's very guts with politics. How does a technical, genuine speaking individual prevail here? Or develop if you will (not develop in terms of inner development or technical skills, but in terms of cash and position). Coz if one doesn't develop in those areas, one would find oneself reporting to the same corporate speech experts but technical retards that one abhors. Seems to me that the only way to resolve this contradiction is to beat them in their own game. As impossible as it may sound, this is the REAL CHALLENGE. To not change from the inside but beat them in their own game, for which one may have to adopt corp speech but it would be means to a different end...an end one genuinely believes in.
Life is about being a Phoenix!
The situation is, regrettably, far more dire. I fear we may have to perform a complete walletectomy.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Fighting is good and would prevail in a company based on fundamentally 'genuine' principles. But what of a company that is rotten in it's very guts with politics. How does a technical, genuine speaking individual prevail here? Or develop if you will (not develop in terms of inner development or technical skills, but in terms of cash and position). Coz if one doesn't develop in those areas, one would find oneself reporting to the same corporate speech experts but technical retards that one abhors. Seems to me that the only way to resolve this contradiction is to beat them in their own game. As impossible as it may sound, this is the REAL CHALLENGE. To not change from the inside but beat them in their own game, for which one may have to adopt corp speech but it would be means to a different end...an end one genuinely believes in.
Life is about being a Phoenix!
You need to write a script to automatically translate emails to/from certain recipients (and some Babel fish for meetings.)
When I was "seperated from the company" as part of a "workforce reduction" I knew exactly what they meant. Especially since I was "relieved of my duties" to focus on my "internal job search" for the next two weeks, but I was also relieved of my laptop, ID badge, keys and office.
I don't know - do you have to learn the secret handshake to join the Buffalo Lodge? Of course you do. Back in highschool, a friend of mine was angry about a perceived slight. See, she had interviewed for Yale and the next day a friend of hers interviewed with the same guy. Her friend had mentioned her and the Yale guy was like "Ohhh, the girl with the um..." and then pointed at his nose, referring to her nose stud. I related this tale of bigotry to my father who replied, "Hey, you don't try to join the Hell's Angels wearing a tuxedo." And that's the point: We humans naturally band together into clubs, packs, guilds and cohorts. Most professions have their own lingo - doctors, engineers, lawyers, waitstaff, etc. If you want to get into the higher-paid management "clique" in your company, you should probably emulate them to whatever extent the extra money is worth the whoring of your "true self".
"I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you."
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
Corporate speak serves to eliminate emotion and minimize objection. Realignment, right-sizing? Terms to get all aboard. Think soldier, think troops.
In Corporate, one doesn't say, "I'm scared.." or "I worry.." one learns "My concern is..." Corporate speak is to minimize emotion not cloud ideas as you suggest.
When one analyzes Corporate one can not ignore that early corporate models were established by those whose backgrounds included the military nevermind sports. Has anything changed?
I thrive to a deadline, adrenalin rush, am less impassioned by a deliberable. Does deliverable suggest a common goal versus individual? Am I onboard when I say it or just fitting in? When in Rome deportment, but back in the field? It's a deadline.
My Corporate world brings me down, makes me think in line not sound.
indifferent children, I couldn't of said it better.
-------- Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most. --Ozzy
Think of it like Chinese.
Regardless of the way the language influences thought, you're going to get more respect if you speak the language of the people you're doing business with.
Even if you think the language dumbs down speakers and listeners, or even de-sensitizes them to unethical behaviour, the fact is that mastering the language is going to give you an edge. If your goal is to succeed within the business, learn it. If, on the other hand, your goal is to crusade for saner, kinder, gentler language, then by all means preach, and resist. Just be prepared to be outdone by competitors who make your bosses feel better and more informed.
Buy all your staff t-shirts that say "100% buzzword compliant" under the company logo and have them wear them to the company meetings.
Nobody will be left busily trying to figure out what I just said... they'll all nod in agreement and leave right after me because I obviously just gave the impression that somebody's already all over it like white on rice and that that somebody was me.
The procedure in fact exists:
Some years ago doctors discovered that a particular type of recurring, intractable back pain was caused by driving long distances with a fat wallet in one's back pocket, which in turn puts pressure against certain nerves. Remove the wallet from the pocket, and the pain goes away!
Some wag dubbed this a "walletectomy" -- which unlike corporate-speak, has a real if ironic meaning ("removal of the wallet").
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Just changed my sig to this Orwell quote yesterday. Good to see that others have taken Orwell's essays on board.
T&K.
Political language
He mistook me for a executive wannabe and asked me about energizing the dynamics in our work group. I told him that people kept talking about thinking outside the box, but since we are in the delivery business we should think ABOUT the box.
The guy looked like he just had a revelation. Something tells me he'd architected a meaningful world class enterprise strategy (and appropriated my sarcasm as a new catch phrase at the same time).
Yet as we get rid of more of these destructive trade barriers, the number of Americans holding "good jobs" (i.e. middle class) has been on the rise.
"for surely that is how we want to live with the majority living in abject poverty with no health care or housing."
Nothing to worry about, since we are moving in the opposite direction from the situation of poverty, no health care, no housing. With homeless for example: the numbers are so small, and a significant proportion of those who are homeless are living that lifestyle by choice (former mental patients, gutter bums etc). The US poverty rate percentage is really quite small and getting smaller. The official total of "35.9 million Americans living in poverty" includes a large proportion of well-fed families with multiple cars, 5 TV's and lots of other luxuries. That's not poverty.
You are right, however. Brazil is not anything to emulate at all. They have a socialist government right now, and socialism has been proven time and again to make problems worse. (Not that Lula is an sort of bloodthirsty fascist dictator like Chavez. He's well-intentioned but misinformed)
"Screw those cheese eating surrender monkey French"
Talk about spiraling down the drain. The socialist stuff there is unraveling: it is not a sustainable system. Even the public transit system is worthless: no "easy access" when lazy transit "workers" stage one of their frequest strikes.
However: what is it with you and ethnic slurs? Earlier you have supported the most vile antisemitism. More recently, you complained of browned-skinned people and/or "Whops". Now it is the French.
I wonder. Do you have any good Polish jokes on you?