Corporate speak: plumbing new depths?

[yolofish]

OK, I know its a topic covered before, but today I got a brief on something for which I am being asked to "dive deep". (snort emoticon). I think they mean examine the topic in depth??

And an oldie from my previous career, but I still believe it's a classic: when our industry rag discovered we had had to make some redundancies in the light of client losses, our chief exec described the situation as "remaking the needs".

Any more new ones or classic golden oldies (eg not blue sky thinking, going forward, pushing the envelope etc etc etc)

Previous boss - clearly not wanting to deal with a particular problem at that point in time - said 'I don't have the bandwidth for this at the moment'.

Stfu.

think I might use that one in future tootsie when dealing with stroppy teens!

Even worse than the deep dive is 'bottoming out'. How not to snigger??

Yes, but you can't map your solutions through a problem solve unless you understand your problem by undertaking deep dive.

I find my 4 year old is great at the 5 whys. Maybe I should train her to run problem solving 'o' events and set her up as a management consultant.

I think my organisation is the source of the material for the Dilbert comic strip.

I heard of a management consultant who, when looking at potential issues with something, asked people to identify the crocodile nearest the canoe. That has featured in our bullshit bingo ever since but never been repeated

sniggering at calm and the crocodile. The thing about management consultants is that they are always about 25, fresh out of a posh uni and have very little -okzero-, um, management experience?

'Boil the ocean' has made an unwelcome appearance in a company a friend of mine works for.

Anyone who uttered the following "We need to press the moist flesh of the low hanging fruit so we can podium" would not survive to tell the tale. Two of my urgh words - moist and flesh along with the rest of the wanker-speak my actions would be totally justified.

I recently heard a woman say to a child, think 5, "you need to manage my expectations" ????

I know they're not new, but the other day I had a message that someone was reaching out to me to touch base.

Where I work, it is about "space". So " let's see what's happening in this space"

Space means topic. Sets my teeth on edge

I don't know if this is and old or new one but

"Avoid working in silos"

Makes me want to punch stuff. Because silos are on farms and we work in an office.

Is anyone else sick of trying 'to turn the tanker'?

My client likes to "socialise" documents instead of emailing them to others. FFS.

All of the above are so common at my workplace that I don't even think of them as ridiculous any more. But I do hate 'reaching out'.

I can't stand reach out.

A management consultant needed to squeeze the issues out of the toothpaste tube with me once. Which is not even corporate speak, he just made it up, the tosser.

I've just written an application for an arts grant...my God! The guidelines were full of this sort of bullshit so I plumbed new depths and I've positively splurged it out in my application. It all makes sense but it's such a bullshitty way of saying something!

In advance of an external audit, we were asked to have everything in apple pie order, not apple crumble!

Interoperability
Ducks in a row
Starter for 10
Managing expectations

These are all used all the time in our organisation- they are oldies but considered cutting edge ar work

My workplace (American owned) is a nightmare for this. My personal favourite is "going forward..." like humans experience time in any different way despite most principles of physics being time-reversible...

Also heard recently:

Deep dives - having a good look at it
Threshold reviewing - also having a good look at it, just not all of it
Touch base (sounds so harassy) no sir, you will not touch my base!
Take it offline - shut the fuck up, you're making this meeting even longer and more arduous than it needs to be, send me a bloody email

And the acronyms...the endless, endless acronyms. One of our senior management came up with a process that had a very rude term as an acronym. It wasn't SHAG (it'll out me completely if I write it but it's something very similar) Some poor, poor underling had to explain to him why his ' shag experts' and 'shagging task force' were resisting putting it in their email signatures.

Seriously, it's like I work in a Dilbert cartoon.

So at the moment our company are in the middle of a 'rightsizing exercise' i.e. Laying people off, so management speak has gone to a whole new level. I'm so tempted to pass out bingo cards in our 'townhalls' (big meetings).

Skipton was it "Duff" or "Boff" or maybe "Frig" ?? Just tell us!

Oh, and I was recently required to change the name of a project that's been running over 2 years, a month before the end date because they wanted something where the acronym sounded better....

I too frequently feel like I work in a Dilbert cartoon. In fact they get passed around between colleagues when they are particularly appropriate.

Im a fucker and repeat it back to them "you want me to dive deep?"

or ask them what they mean.