Argh business speak

[StealthPolarBear]

"lenses" grrrrrr

And someone who says alrightey

Apart from as in contact or glasses what does 'lenses' mean? How is it used?

I take it you don't work in Specsavers

My personal peeve is 'action' used as a verb. "Can you action this email?" No but I can fucking reply to it!

I love these threads as I’m a big fan of business speak It spices up the day, especially with a game of jargon bingo.

I particularly like words that don’t really mean or add anything. In my profession, ‘space’ and ‘piece’ get used a lot. Like “they’re working on a project in the digital space” or “we need more resource for the engagement piece”. What I hear is “I’ve no idea how to phrase this so this vague catch all will do nicely and makes me sound management-like”.

And everyone around the table nods sagely in agreement with them, equally clueless as to what precisely is being discussed

No, I have no problem with lenses in specs avers!
Look at this problem through the lens of a customer, or through the lens of someone worried about safety.

Don't.... We're constantly having to see things through a different fucking lens....

And don't even talk to me about socialising the document....

Talking to the slides
It's when they talk back you need to worry

Dotty ooh that's a new one for me, what does that mean please?

Stealth I hate this "Talking to" or "speaking to" that's in use now.

Thinking about this more as I’m getting into it... (ha!).

I do have some genuine dislikes, despite generally finding amusement in it. I am fed up of ‘levers’, we don’t have levers to pull, we can’t count the levers, or evaluate them in any way. We just want to figure out how we can get done what we want to get done.

I am also very much done with ‘being agile’. Where I work they’ve just adopted the term without changing anything about what we do. There is one particular senior leader who goes on about how we need to be agile, and yet is so far away from anything remotely related to failing fast and minimum viable products etc. They need ultimate control, a 12 month plan with 127 pre-planned checkpoints and everything interrogated to the most minute detail, then signed off through 13 layers of hierarchy (horizontal and vertical), followed by weekly briefings in which everything must be rosy and perfect because clearly if something needs improving then something has gone wrong/someone dropped the ball/it wasn’t thought through.

That. Is. Not. Agile.

And breathe.

Ah yes. Agile will solve all your problems. Without changing anything. And how flexible can a way of working that has 17 principles, most of which start "you MUST" be?
And why are we all doing what twelve beardy men in utah decided, without evidence, is a good idea for software development?

"monetising the offer" my current work bugbear.

Socialising the document?? Lord almighty.

Oh, yes, this 'lens' thing is so annoying. Totally meaningless. Apart from random differences in quality of eyesight, all humans have the same 'lenses'.

What's wrong with 'looking at it from a customer's point of view'?

Obviously, we can't use that phrase because people would understand it too easily.

Loop them in
Ladder up
Granular
Deck
Be more rhino

The list goes on and on

Be more rhino

What, very short sighted, extremely bad tempered and go charging into things without thinking it through first?

I'm going to be the first person in my place of work to use "be more rhino". I'll do it completely inappropriately.
"now we need to be more rhino and take this very slowly and carefully over the coming weeks to see what develops"

I hate this "Talking to" or "speaking to" that's in use now.

That's been going since at least the early 80s when I did a personal assistants course and was taught to use it when writing minutes of meetings 'so and so spoke to his paper on the use of grommits versus flanges'

Is that a polite way of saying they never looked up or made eye contact with anyone while reading verbatim?
Seriously, do you understand it?

OMD Stealth, that's so true!

re "speaking to" - oh, I only heard that in the last 5 years or so.

still no idea what "socialising the document" means. Guessing - send it round to everyone?

I took it to mean see how various different groups would react to it

Don't get me started, one of the inept learning managers at our company has decided he likes the term "agnostic learning"

He's too dimwitted to realise that's a term used for how computers (AI) learn...not how people learn on computers. Someone on his team tried to politely correct him and he went gunning for their job because they'd been disrespectful!

OP - I was just taught that that was the way it should be recorded when writing minutes - basically anyone talking about or expanding on a document/slide show was 'speaking to' it. I always thought it sounded daft but just got used to using it. It would be interesting to know when it was first coined - but I'm betting it's at least from the 1950s.

This is starting to remind me of the Thick of It episode where the junior people have to give evidence at an enquiry and keep trying to out-formal each other, so they come out with stuff like "I can't speak as to that."

Right, I've just done some internet research. Apparently 'to speak to' a topic/paper has been in use since 1918.

moosesormeece I was rewatching that the other night! “I don’t recall to that”

In addition to business speak, we have commonly used idioms in business where I work. Top faves are “in our gift”, “not beyond the wit of man” and “boil the ocean”. These seem to be said in every meeting, and once one person says one another will repeat it.

Another one used far too much, which also means far too little, is “across the piece”. I used to work alongside a project manager who thought she knew absolutely everything and would speak down to people in like manner. She would always say “across the piste” and I couldn’t help but imagining her slaloming through project milestones...