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 after I had cleared my day to take on an "emergency"... "Don't worry I have spun another plate in" meaning she found some other poor sole to give it to. I know where I would like to put the plate :/

There's a very funny book, a few years old now, called "Who moved my BlackBerry" which is jam packed with ludicrous management speak.

My manager often tells me to "park it" which means "Shut up Soprano".

Having worked in Higher education for the best part of 15 years I can turn almost every word into an acronym.

But why does the language exist? When I worked, it was in a management capacity and I kept it to an absolute minimum because I didn't want to sound like a wanker. Surely those who partake have the self-awareness to realise they too sound like wankers?

I bet it was RIM. Resource Inventory Management or something.

I've just finished editing some talking heads videos to go on the intranet of a multinational corporate client. Their chiefs and directors of this and that from around the world. Strangely, it was the french ones who did this the most. Women the least.

And after editing about 30 of these I realised it made the speaker seen less knowledgeable to me. Bullshitting by hiding behind metaphors in lieu of something meaningful to say.

Oh god the acronym obsession

I got a book for DH a couple of years ago called "Who toughed base in my though shower?" which was full of these sort og stupid phrases.

Anyone remember Gus from Drop the Dead Donkey?

"Who touched base in my thought shower". Gah!!

DH tells me that where he works they say "shall we discuss this offline?" when they mean "lets talk about it after the meeting" CRINGE!

The proliferation of LinkedIn is also making this sort of thing worse.

I don't work in financial services but deal with clients in this industry. People have started to say: Lets "broke" this idea...the way you would shares or something.

aRRGGGGHHHHh

"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."

He might, might have been taking the piss. I really hope so.

"In your gift" I'm not even sure I understand what this means but it's everywhere.

My ex employers.... New guy got brought in to fix problems that weren't there and generally made everyone miserable.

One afternoon he turned to the boss and said "right, are we blue skying now?"
They then went and had a 30 min meeting

I was once in a meeting with a man who wanted to tell us something he'd heard in another meeting. He asked for 'permission to retweet' the idea.

Maybe not new but reaching out has become the replacement for 'calling you '

Balthazar I'm reaching out to you to see if you could support the team?

Aka
Balthazar we are fucked, I'm calling to see if you can come and cover?

At my old office we would "cascade" the information we had gathered from our most recent town hall meeting to other departments - aka send an email, to make sure we're all signing from the same hymn sheet

Pmsl at RIM and SHAG and omfg at permission to retweet

Most of these are used where I work and I particularly despise "let's not boil the ocean"

I'd also like to add 'right sizing the workforce' and 'let's do this in slower time' meanng, respectively, make redundancies and let's not make a decision now.

And this, yuk, yuk, "well he's got skin in the game"

In my old company, better performing departments were known as Speedboats. My managers were quite often to be found exhorting us all to be "Productivity Ninjas". I'm rather glad I left. (or should that be "extracted my skills base")

Oh god, and leverage...

... Everything has to be be fucking leveraged. It can't just be 'used'

As I said to my team once 'I don't want to hear this word unless you you are actually using a lever to exert force. Or blackmailing someone.'

One which irks me is 'accessible' as in 'the report wasn't accessible'. Does this mean "we only have one copy and Joe has locked it away in his office and gone on holiday taking the key"? Or does it mean "it's written so badly that no one can make head nor tail of it"? It's the latter, I think.

Oh god I hate this crap. I work for a massive UK consultancy in their NI branch. Every time a big boss comes over we are treated to a "cascade" of information and participate in "thought showers". Thank god they only remember the NI office every few months!

I used to have a boss like this. Every time he came out with one of the phrases I would say "you mean xyz?" and translate the tosspot talk back to normal speak. Sometimes in a meeting I would wait until I had heard a few phrases and mutter "bingo!" No, it didn't make me popular with the wankery speakers but I wasn't alone in taking the piss.

I think the people who use corp speak do it as an ego boost, trying to raise themselves above those outside whatever the industry is.

Agree with RaskolnikovsGarret . I use/ hear most of these terms on a daily basis and don't even realise how wanky they sound.

I've just heard a colleague talk about whether there was any granularity in something. It means detail. Pulled DP on that crap a couple of weeks ago.

Mind you DP does have a sense of humour - he once designed an Automated Response System in an organisation fond of acronyms. It was ages before anyone overseeing the project realised.

further to retweet above (or should that be 'in terms of') anyone else ever had someone comment and follow up with : "Hashtag xyz" in an un-ironic way???????

Hehe wowfudge - now imagining company bigwigs solemnly discussing how best to cascade the latest output from ARS

I think there's a lot of truth in the suggestion that it is often self-important inadequates who go in for this - at least in the UK. I'd probably excuse people in large companies who probably can't help it if that is the culture they're immersed in throughout the working day.

I once worked in a company the Chief Executive of which was a right dickhead in so, so many ways. He did an MBA part time and we could always tell which part of the syllabus he'd got to by whichever idiotic new idea he came up with. He loved corporate-speak even though no-one else in the company used it, and meetings with him were only endurable by playing bullshit bingo. One of his favourite phrases was "Across the piece" and it was SO tempting to ask him what piece.

At one point he announced a competition to name the building the company had just moved into. People came up with all sorts of sensible suggestions based on the history of the area etc, but he dismissed them all and awarded the prize to himself. I'd better not give the name he came up with, but it was a corporate buzzword with "House" tacked onto the end: he was incredibly proud of it, whilst everyone else in the company was just cringing and refused to put it into the address if they could possibly avoid it.