This particular beauty was included in a recent ‘leadership update’:

“Firstly, we have signed a transformational outsourcing deal with xxxx which will deliver an increase to our cost synergies from the £112m per annum in 2013, which we will still hit on time, to £143m per annum by 2015. This deal de-risks the embedded value, contractualises the delivery of the cost synergies, and it de-risks the execution of our plans, allowing us to focus on the other opportunities we have as a business.”

Ain’t it a beauty?

Not full blown corporate b0llocks, but my former boss once informed us that we ‘need to be singing from the same boat on this one’.

Sage advice, I think.

Briliant

Our account managers used to be encouraged to ‘farm the base’.

Eh?

Hey guys, I know I am seeing a lot of back-and-forth on this topic, but I really need to push back and raise some red flags here. Some of these phrases are foundational to our ability to drive efficiencies in a corporate landscape. Sure, some are just boilerplate solutions, leveraged to the hilt and really only keeping us at a 30,000-foot-view of things. Others, however, really allow us to get better granularity, find better directional-indicators, or loop back and dive deep into some critical issues on a go-forward basis.

I think if you all start using more of these phrases, you’ll find yourself trending toward the positive, but you’ll have to keep an eye on the puck. Gut through it, reduce thrash, and let’s stay in lock-step on this. Yes, we will synergize!

What’s the root cause of the hatred of management speak? I’ll put my layman’s hat on and guess that it comes from movies such as Office Space and Dilbert cartoons. But we all know that these phrases allow us to touch base in a much more efficient manner.

I have to time-box this comment, as I have a hard-stop in a moment when I will have to jump onto a call. So, just one more point that I want to cover-off on: let’s socialize the idea of speaking with more management speak and loop back to see whether we’re being more impactful. From a management standpoint, I think that we can get the traction to do it.

So, net/net, ignore the naysayers, sidebar the folks that are stuck in the weeds, and don’t waste cycles or bandwidth on folks that don’t align strongly with this mission. Try it out, and we’ll have another touch point in a little while to see if we’ve moved the needle.

If you need me, I will be online again in a bit.

— sent from my iPad

I thought all this pish was 20years ago stuff?

Why is there this need to mangle language?

If a manager spoke to me like that, I’d wee ‘cascade’ into their shoes.

If anyone else toady says ‘granular’ I will granulate them!

I used to supervise contractors building structures in the footway and sometimes had complaints that we had compromised the integrity of basements, cellars etc

Was dealing with one of these complaints and the woman mentioned “having the drains up” spent ages trying to explain it had nothing to do with the drains before she said rather stroppily that wasn’t what she meant

Silly cow and still not exactly sure what she was going on about

wife came home talking about ‘rightsourcing’ the other night.

We got so fed up with one of our clients using ‘cascade’ that we invented the cascadation matrix which allegedly keeps track of information as it’s cascaded. With pretty colours and everything. We send a slightly different version every month and it’s complete nonsense 😀

To encourage outside he box thinking we are expected to have ‘bluesky thinking’ sessions, and are expected to get a colleague to ‘cold eyes review’ everything before sending it out.

A client of our uses ”in the spirit of the contract” all the time.
At monthly meetings with said client we award points (pints actually) to the person who can use it the most.
Im rubbish but once got 7 in a two hour meeting. Top honour goes to one of my surveyors, He slipped it in 15 times.

I think they cottoned-on after that.

‘Nice problem to have’ always used to make me see red, ie. orders are way above capcity and it’s your problem to fulfil them with no extra resources. Nice problem for whom exactly.

When did brainstorming become non-pc?

“vanilla” and “blue sky” thinking always got on my t*ts

Anything you have to re-read more than twice should be written down on paper, then cumpled up, placed in a big pile at the base of a bonfire with the moron who issued them sat on the top of it and lit.
Synergise that ****.

djg – 😆

So what does this look like?

In meetings we always call their bluff. It’s good fun watching the managers struggling to explain what they really meant.

meeting takeaways
leveraging
blamestorming

My personal favourite in the Govt Dept i work in is….Incentivise.

I figure anything spellcheck can’t cope with must be bovine excretia.

In the days of the internet boom and our company was making no money at all, the word “monetize” was used a lot. I think it meant we need to make some profit maybe? Or maybe just get some income coming in.

Today I learned how we are to achieve agile delivery by backlogging tasks between sprints and incorperate reverse shadowing into knowledge aqusition plans for review at daily standups.

Occasionally I use corporate speak as a result of being surrounded by corporate winkers, I always cringe internally.
I generally find that the really good people use it sparingly but the others surround themselves by it to disguise the fact that they don’t know what they are talking about.

I once had someone say,

I’m happy to honey bee on that for you

I still have no idea what he meant. I did want to punch him, though.

I’ll defend “agile” as being outside of the BWB remit; it has a specific meaning rather than the usual nonsense.

Our account managers used to be encouraged to ‘farm the base’.

Were they World of Warcraft players?

we invented the cascadation matrix which allegedly keeps track of information as it’s cascaded. … We send a slightly different version every month and it’s complete nonsense

That’s absolutely tremendous. I’d have been proud of that.

See hereShoot the puppy covers this nicely

Great way to monetise the opportunity 🙂

Where I worked previously they were constantly ‘de-risking’.

It took me a while before I realised that is was used for when something on the project had been postponed…

Leveraging is the current one for the corporate morons where I work. For a while it was solutions, but we’ve moved on.

I saw “riding the macro-economic tailwinds” in some work slides the other day. Yuk.

I have a mate who deliberately drops this nonsense into meetings.

He called his team in for a meeting last week and finished the meeting with the phrase ‘So we really need to brown-fence this project as soon as possible…any questions?’

He said there were none.

“world class”

meaningless rubbish

“touch base”

oh god, I’m going to have to beat someone with a bat.

“big hand, small map” 😉

monetiz[u]s[/u]e

You are not in America now, corporate boy.

p**s me right off bloomin default dictionary in Word being that yank ba****disation of OUR language on all the docs I get because our company is US based.

‘flippin stupid size they use for printer paper too. When do these backward countries intend to get decimalised?

some words are valid even though you may hate them: vanilla, leverage and de-risk are good, single words which explain a thing/ action which would usually take more.
touch base, reach out, blue sky, brown fence, thought shower are all horse shit (in its literal sense)

I really need to push back

Top honour goes to one of my surveyors, He slipped it in 15 times.

Do you guys know each other?

“Thought shower” because brainstorming is offensive to epileptics. Led to an epileptic colleague getting told off for being insensitive to herself.

My last boss in the bank was a bloomin genius, she told us “Don’t work smarter- work harder”

I had this is a job description I had to edit for the organisation I work for recently (bear in mind this is in the third sector):
“To work with the XXX Director to further sharpen [organisation’s] expression of its value added and offer in the current context.”

A small part of me died inside. I described it to my boss (who didn’t write it btw) as ‘vacuous nonsense’.

I have sent memos back with a note asking for an explanation when the gobbledegook count got too high