Management Speak

[coupekid]

Dont you just hate it.

Going forward, it just seems to becoming more and more popular.
When people are touching base, and carrying out some blue sky thinking, throwing all the ingrediants into the mind wok, and being careful to not just grab the low hanging fruit, why do they feel the need to abandon the English language?
Sometimes I just want to reply with 'I am so sorry, please can you repeat that for people who's first language is English?'

Heres an interesting article I found on the BBC web site:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/berkshire/content/articles/2005/01/19/voices_management_speak_feature.shtml

Does this wind anyone else up?

[Stephen]

Re: Management Speak

Thanks for the 'heads up' on that one Ben

[Patrick]

Re: Management Speak

Dont you just hate it.

Going forward, it just seems to becoming more and more popular.
When people are touching base, and carrying out some blue sky thinking, throwing all the ingrediants into the mind wok, and being careful to not just grab the low hanging fruit, why do they feel the need to abandon the English language?
Sometimes I just want to reply with 'I am so sorry, please can you repeat that for people who's first language is English?'

Heres an interesting article I found on the BBC web site:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/berkshire/content/articles/2005/01/19/voices_management_speak_feature.shtml

Does this wind anyone else up?

Certainly does.
The other irritation is reducing everything to initials only, I can live with a few abbreviations, in the technical world its all reduced to initials . The users assume because they know what is meant the whole world and their dog do.
Well it looses me much of the time and I know it does others.

Patrick

[JSR]

Re: Management Speak

Now you know that if you're going to complain about that, you're not being a team player.

I suggest you sign yourself up for a paintball weekend in order to break down the barriers with your fellow team players. After all, everyone in the team is equal. It's just that some are more equal than others.

The silly thing about all of this is that I've been watching the reruns of "Only Fools and Horses" and they had that episode with the guy from the bank using all of these daft phrases years and years ago - long before anyone had even heard of "The Office" and before Ricky Gervais' character was even a glint in the milkman's eye. The guy on OFAH is shown up for the prat that he is for using such ridiculous nonsense in place of real words and intelligently constructed sentences. All of this "see if you can get your head 'round this" and "let me run this one by you", etc.

Today, we all have to embrace his prattishness. (Can I copyright "prattishness", please?)

[StuartR]

Re: Management Speak

Ahhhh, my favourite thing to hate.

I work in IT, (the bastion of 3,4,5 & 6 letter acronyms) for a company that has over 500,000 employees. I won't say who, but if you could see the flowery language used in some of the Power-Point slide-shows we get sent from head-office you'd probably weep . The fact that most are also translated from German (badly) or written is a strange middle-European version of English, doesn't help either. They also use American spell-checkers - no offence to readers on t'other side of the pond, but I like to see an S where you use Z and "gotten" just ain't a word!

Two things we do to make life more amusing.

1) In meetings we play "corporate bullshit bingo". A simple grid with 20 or so of the corporate terms or words that are flavour of the month and you just cross them off as you hear them. I once sat in an all-day meeting in Paris with 40 people, from just about every country in Europe, trying to "map some processes to promote synergistic use of internal systems" (IIRC) and my colleague played the game to alleviate the inevitable boredom and actually got so engrossed that he called "house" just a bit louder than he meant to .

2) Go here http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html and hit the button a few times - I wrote a longish email using this excellent tool to one of our more prattish marketing guys who was looking for a technology article for the company intranet. For a few glorious minutes he wasn't too sure if it was real or not. .

Prattishness is an excellnt word - I will use it as soon as I can!