Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
No it is not, in fact, it should be resisted at all costs. Corporate speak is the opposite of language.
This is not always true. Corporate speak can be used to obfuscate, confuse, impress, overwhelm, or it can simply be a particular lexicon. Just like legalese can be used to frustrate or to clarify in a way no other mode of language can.
What if the roles were reversed? Suppose the poster is a business major who has been thrust into the IT/S division of his company, asking us business folk if he should have to learn these ridiculous technical terms in order to communicate with the people he has to deal with every day. Your advice in that situation translates to: Hell no! Fight those socially inept geeks who try to confuse the real issue by loading up on technical terms and all that garbage. Whenever a network administrator submits his network health analysis report, hand it right back to him and tell him to use plain English. We'll not be having all this "TCP/IP" garbage. What the hell does that even mean, anyway? Why can't you use an easy word we all understand, like "traffic"?
The language of business means real things to the people who deal with it, just like technical terms mean real things to others. You make the mistake of assuming all lexicons outside your own are devoid of meaning because you don't know the meaning.
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
No offense, but I'd rather deal with MBA-speak than Annoying Nerd Sarcasm any day.
And for anyone who doubts that "deliverable" is a useful term, check today's interviews with Bruce Perens and with the new Debian leader to see what happens when that concept is missing.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Having worked at HP under Carly- I *know* most of them are right. It takes a special kind of incompetence to cut stock prices in half, destroy profitable divisions (calculators), bribe investors to go along with your plans (the bank of germany changed from a anti-merger to a pro-merger vote 15 minutes before the election- coinciding with a 1 billion dollar revolving loan from them), sink employee morale to all time lows, freeze raises for 4 years, have no real bonuses for 4 years (while talking about how great the numbers were), and blame it all on the employees not delivering to her vision. Oh, and have the market cap of the company go up *4 billion dollars* on the day you're fired.
What?!?! No, I'm not bitter. I was one of the lucky ones- I got offered voluntary severance in the program the interim CEO put into effect. I consider the 5 months severance pay compensation for 4 years without a raise.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
"You can use new technology as an opportunity to improve the operation of your business."
There was a time when the word opportunity was a management buzword. I still hate the word. It seems to have become part of the business vocabulary even of people that hate corporate speak. Look:
"You can use new technology to improve the operation of your business."
Take the word out and the sentence has lost no meaning. That should be the definition of corporate speak.
I think you're missing the point of that corporate-speke sentence.
One of the biggest reasons why techies misunderstand C-Speke so often is because they are playing a different game. They want performance, they want efficiency, and they apply skill and acumen as a business tool. Therefore direct non-abstract literalism is the preferred (and for their line of work, only) medium of exchange.
Now put yourself in the mindset of a business strategist. He was not saying that applying a particular technology will improve their business. The most literal meaning would be "We can make use of the hype around this new technology, the nature of which may be irrelevant to our concerns, to do things marketing-wise that are bluntly obvious to everyone in this room but that we don't want to say on the record.".
C-Speke is very rarely about the technologies or concepts it talks about - it's a way for a different industry (marketing, analysis, and general business operations) to invoke shared abstractions without having to spell out the complexities on the spot. It's to a great extent a set of euphemisms that describe the realities of business without the perceived vulgarity of clearly stating the obvious. It's also very often a means of incorporating technical concepts that you cannot assume the target has an understanding of, and instead allows you to skip to the applicable part - the results.
For instance... without business speak, many innocuous statements would be forced to say exactly what they mean... such as:
"It is the belief of our marketing department that the tactics we will shortly propose will take advantage of the inherent weaknesses in the judgement of our clientele, as per our extensive research and marketing experiments, driving a wedge between them and our competition. Such a result can be taken advantage of with quick manuevering and specifically targetted activity. This action is quasi-legal according to our legal department, but with enough obfuscation we can get away with it. Covering this up requires a significant change in our business practices, which we must find a confusing means of portraying in a positive light."
The fun part for the rest of you is to convert that honest statement into classic Corporate Speke. Remember, other C-Speakers should be able to get the gist of it, but you can't actually SAY what you mean.
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
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."
... 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.
A few years back I was working for a big company and IBM wanted to present a change to their product line that would impact a major project we were working on. The technology was about to change drastically and I got us an invitation to their development center. When IBM asked our president who from our company should participate he said not to invite me because "he'll only ask a bunch of technical questions and we'll get bogged down". This was a technical briefing we were supposed to attend. Obviously I don't corporate speak.
I don't know if your mythical business communications classes exist anymore. I haven't seen enough clearly written communications lately to believe such advice was ever given!
I've recently read two really good books about corporate-speak. The first was "Death Sentences" by Don Watson, and the second was "Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth About Bullshit" by Laura Penny. Penny's book points out the pervasive use of bullshit in our culture -- how the lies are indeed being repeated by the liars so often that they don't even know when they're lying any more. It's fairly entertaining in a depressing sort of way; it points out a lot of problems in our society, but offers no real solutions. It has a very leftist slant -- I don't know if that's because the writer is leftist, or because the current administration happens to be right wing.
Watson's book, on the other hand, pleads for us to clean up our writing, and offers useful advice. Of the two, I'd highly recommend Death Sentences if you're interested in improving your own writing. I'd recommend Penny's book only if you'd rather explore the lies our culture seems to be built upon.
John
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. .
Whenever people on Slashdot complain about "corporate-speak", I see ridiculous examples that have just got to be made up because they don't make any sense to me, the target audience of such language. But if you transcribed real examples of "management speak", odds are many or most would have precise meanings understood by the people to whom the communication was intended. There are plenty of examples of misuse, of course, but any competent "management type" looks down on such misuse and isn't fooled by it.
I'm as amused as anyone by the Bullsh*t Bingo cards, but I can tell you that phrases like "Total Cost of Ownership" and "Turnkey Solution" have specific meanings that, absent those phrases, would take many more words to describe.
Now watch me hit this drive.
take, for example, your A and B examples. you've suggested that A is essentially a way to cover up perceived deficiencies in B. but it's not. they're saying very different things about the same topic. B is about cost, in both money and time. it's the way project managers think, or technical folks who rise above just pure implementation. but A is about why that cost is worth it. A conveys different information than B; in your example, A suggests that the players in the industry with the most future-looking plans are doing "whatever", and are likely worth following (presumably based on past performance). it also makes use of emotive words, something that frequently grates on engineers as "unanalytical" or some such. but for people - particularly people with a less analytical mindset, but really for any mentally healthy human - emotion conveys an encapsulated set of information. the information in A - the information conveyed by means of emotive lanugage - is the type of information that decision-makers use to decide what they'd like to do. B - the cost - comes later.
none of this is to say that it can't get out of control. sure, sometimes bad business folks want to use one mode of language to replace the other. and that's not good, because it obscures information. but just as frequently bad engineers want to use one mode to replace another, and that's just as bad; it just obscures different information.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
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.