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I found this article on management speak to really sprinkle some magic so I thought I'd cascade it to you guys and loop back to see what you thought. Let's conversate on it and maybe we can employ a dynamic attitude and move forward in this space

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7457287.stm

 

Absolutely atrocious. Laughing at this was a guilty pleasure - I mean, yeah, some people are apparently trying to kill the language and create yet another exemplum of unnecessary, hermetic newspeak, they are doing it in a funny way, but they are still doing it...

While I understand some of the choices based on poor man's psycholinguistics (as in, the assumption that re-naming 'problem' to 'challenge' will magically change the employees' attitude), the rest seems even more damn irrational.

Reminds me of a tiresome, tiresome conversation with a certain conceited man I had the dubious pleasure of meeting. He absolutely refused to accept the fact that the term 'patronizing' has negative connotations. After it had been proven to him, he reacted by saying: 'Well, but it means something different FOR ME!'

That, more or less, seems to be the case with the propagators of business-speak. I wish everyone sharing this attitude best of luck in finding a common language with the rest of the world.

 

I worked in a call centre once where we had to use specific phrases with customers (it was called Making It Happen). We weren't allowed to say 'no' 'problem' or several other things. We had to say certainly instead of yes. The opening speech was the worst and a, suposedly good, call was: 'Good Morning Npower, how may I help you today?'
'I've just had my bill and it's really high'
'I can certainly take a look at that for you. My name is Jayne, Jayne Smith, may I take your name please'
'John Smith'
'Thanks for that Mr. Smith, may I take your account number?'
'2365123123123'
'Thanks for that. Can you confirm your address, telephone number and method of payment on your account for me?'
'It's *insert above here*'
'Thanks for that. Looking at your account, I can see that your meter reads have been estimated for the past 3 years. To move this forward for you, the most efficient thing would be for you to take a meter reading for me so that I can immiediately correct your bill. Can you do that for me now?'
'I don't know how.'
'That's fine Mr. Smith, I can certainly arrange for a meter reader to come out to your property to take that reading for you. When we receive that reading we will re-bill your account accurately for you. If this affects your current payments in anyway, we shall certainly re-evaluate your monthly amount for you'
*Arrange appointment*
'Thanks for your call today Mr. Smith. Is there anything else I may help you with today?'
'No'
'That's great, I hope you have a really enjoyable day today'

Unfortunately, what generally happened was that the customer would give a reading, the bill would go through the roof, they'd scream for a bit and when you said have a nice day, they'd either rant at you or say 'yeah, i hope you don't'
I found it got in the way of actually giving good customer service. The whole thing had clearly been thought up by some half-wit who'd never answerd a phone in his life and probably got paid far too much!

 

My favorite is 'cascading,' which as they say sounds indeed like a fancy form of 'peeing on you,' which is what this bizarre language subculture may be seeking to do to us. Sometimes they just get it right.


I once got into a pretty heated fight on the phone with a tech support guy. (We had communication issues and didn't see eye-to-eye.) Rather than say "thanks for that" or "that's fine," he basically told me to go f*ck myself. We disagreed and were unable to 'interface' in such a way as to 'move forward' on 'actionable' 'solutions,' but I've never had more respect for a tech support guy. At least I knew I was talking to a real person and not some body snatcher. I bet they fired him though for deviating from the script so dramatically (if they were listening in).

 

What I absolutely despise is the unnecessary use of English words in Dutch language, especially when it's about business or study. Like sales manager iso verkoopleider. Look at the following "Dutch" frase:
"De human resource manager moet weer een headhunter inhuren omdat de sales manager geswitcht is naar research & development."
Translation to English: The human research manager has to hire a headhunter again, because the sales manager has switched to research & development." But I guess any English speaking person could have figured that out...

 

I did and I'm not too bright!

 

You mean you're moving forward with your actionable intelligence challenge!

 

Rep'd!

 

I hate three letter acronyms more than i hate newspeak to quote my team leader on fb today, "SLA GDF ATL CMS OMG WTF BBQ"

 

And that means...?

 

Service Level Agreement, Global Delivery Framework, Assistant Team Leader, Content Management System, and if you don't know the rest of them I refuse to admit I know you

 

she put that as a status? it doesn't make any sense!

 

It does when you realize she has been driven mad by all the acronyms around her

 

Fair enough

 

I used to work for a company whose CEO was, by all appearances, and incredibly dynamic and articulate speaker. But he had gone so far into "corporate speak" that most people couldn't actually understand what the hell he was talking about at any given moment. It sounded sharp, concise, and "smart" but what in the hell did it mean? He ended up taking speech lessons to learn how to "dumb down" his way of talking. He had actually forgotten how to speak like a normal human being. It was pretty funny.

I remember that me and several other coworkers used to count how many times he would say "on a go-forward basis" or other such meaningless jargon during corporate speeches or discussions.

I've worked in corporate America for some 15 years now, and I can speak corporate-ese with the best of them, but I always remember that CEO, and am very careful to actually speak intelligibly, and, well, like a human being.

 

I wonder if we could crash the corporate-speak server by does-not-computing it to death ...



We must fail to prepare an inactive default position using backward planning so as to disincentivise our 180 degree thinking somehwere outside of this space and leave our ducks in a jumble as we move backward separately while delivering only 90% paradigm stability and betraying the values of our leveraged trap door!