Business Jargon

Somebody at work once told me he was having ‘negative start-up synergy’. I, of course, asked him what that meant. It turns out he was just screwing things up badly.

The hypothesis I'm proposing is we all need to take a stand against mindless management babble and confusing corporate jargon - it says the person using it has no emphaty with the people around them and all too often it suggests that The Emperor has no clothes but doesn't want to appear naked. I’m hearing more and more of the same dreadful drivel around these days and reading it on various Internet sites. So I find I can no longer sit on the fence. It’s time for me to take a stand and advocate simple, plain English in the workplace.

Disintermediation. Now there’s a classic word. Or how about its first cousin, reintermediation? Any idea what either of them mean? Actually, you’re not supposed to know. Corporate jargon is deliberately designed to disguise true meanings and confuse listeners.

You’ve probably heard of euphemisms – substituting mild expressions for more blunt ones. Nothing is wrong with that in most circumstances, but lately they have been abused. Companies frequently use euphemisms when they don’t want something to be fully spelled out or understood. Take the word ‘empowerment’, for example. Companies like to think that it means giving workers more autonomy. But it’s really just a euphemism for work intensification. Or how about the words ‘delayering’, ‘downsizing’ and ‘rightsizing’? These are all words used to disguise redundancy. Pretty insulting, isn’t it?

Equally insulting is the new phrase ‘human capital’. It’s supposed to describe the value a staff member brings to a company. I find the phrase downright degrading to employees. ‘Human resources’ is already bad enough. I think both phrases should be banned. Then there’s the grammatically suspect development of turning nouns into verbs. Consider words like ‘diarising’, ‘visioning’, ‘headquartering’ and ‘incentivising’. I blame Kiwis who have long been "Flatting" in London!

Where will it all stop? I suppose it will change when we no longer know or remember the difference between a noun and a verb. Also it’s irritating and silly to talk about ‘growing’ a business or a product range when neither are plants. What’s wrong with saying that a company is ‘building its business’ or ‘expanding its product range’? Those sound much more appropriate to me. I also prefer the simpler phrases of ‘partnership’ and ‘international growth’ to their recent replacements: ‘corporate alliancing’ and ‘global development’. Who do the users of this new management-speak really think they’re fooling?

We all know that the promise of a ‘competitive salary’ in a job advert really means the company remains competitive by paying less than its competitors. And an invitation to ‘join a fast-paced company’ means the company has no time to train you and you’ll be horsed to death. A company ‘requiring team leadership skills’ means you’ll have the responsibilities of a manager but neither the salary nor the support.
Companies need to cop on. It’s really very simple. You’ve got to communicate clearly if you want to be understood and if you want to make an impact. So let’s cut out the confusing jargon. It doesn’t impress anybody.

Oh … and just to put you out of your misery, ‘disintermediation’ means cutting out the middle man, while ‘reinternediation’ means creating a new form of middle man to be reinstated. Impressive, isn’t it?