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Corporate culture creates some fascinating nonsense speak, which Fight The Bull is so admirably equipped to warn us about. As Shel commented in FIR 77, one’s propensity to speak in corporate jargon increases with the amount of saturation in the bull.
So I propose that we create a place on the web where we can list our favourite nonsense cliches.
To kick start this off, and to exclude the infamous “synergistic” and “paradigm shifts” here’s two that REALLY get my goat:
“going forward” (as in “going forward, we will need to increase our market share”, or “going forward, we will need to introduce these tasty new vegemite voluvents to the canteen menu”)
and “socialise” (as in, “we need to socialise this new initiative across several departments”)
If you need a really helpful tool to create your own jargon, please avail yourself of a Buzzword creator that I have on my organizational communication barriers article on my main website. Scroll about half way down the page and look for a box with a button that says ‘Buzz!’
An example buzzphrase I just created was:
“ongoing assurance of the product architecture being functionally equivalent and parallel to the paradigm shift postulated by the use of management dialog technology”
Beat that!
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
How about “win-win.” I’m getting really tired of that one. Or “impacting our customer relationships.”
I would write more, but I am too busy translating the above into English for a client. ;-))