Boardroom Bullshit
Right.
It's just under a month into the new year - how much boardroom
bullshit have you been subjected to by your clatter of under-qualified managers who are
consistently over-remunerated for incredibly poor performance?:
Going forward – loose, meaningless and overused
To 'Action' something - how about simply 'doing' it?
Touch base - about as meaningful as ‘let's do lunch’
Circle back - to catch up later
Blue-sky thinking – like 'thinking outside the box' they both translate as 'doing your job'
Brainstorm – just like 'thought showers', totally meaningless
Low hanging fruit - means nothing, as no one knows what tasks are actually being referred to
Get the ball rolling - simply means 'begin'
Drill down - not, as one might think, anything to do with heavy machinery
End of play - curious strain of kiddy-talk in bureaucratese
Deliverables – the postman always rings twice, especially with your e-bay parcel
Issues – no, they’re problems
Leverage – ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the world’, said Archimedes. He didn't say he would leverage the deliverables matrix
Stakeholders - wooden-spike-wielding vampire hunters
Competencies – nope, it’s ‘abilities’ or ‘skills’
Sunset – why call a spade a spade when you can cloy an euphemism?
Core Competency – the opposite of core mediocrity, itself the specialism of any self-respecting HR person, occupying, as they all tend to, another planet
Buy-In – what some unqualified manager asks if you’ll do after the fact because he didn’t value you enough to discuss it with you in the first place
Empower – the misspelling of a utility company
Corporate Values – sorry, but corporations don’t have any values; the people who run them do. And they're usually all just about making money
Scalable – the venture capitalist’s business nirvana craving
Solution - usually refers to a collection of technologies too abstract or complex to describe in a way that anyone would care about if they were explained in plain English
Leverage - the granddaddy of nouns converted to verbs and it really just means the way Michael O’Leary of RyanAir extracts money from passengers
Vertical – a painful expression referring to a specific area of expertise
Robust - a cup of good coffee is robust. A software program, like the banking system, is not
Giving 110% - to tell someone to give more than 100% is to also tell them that you failed maths in school
Take it to the next level - in practice, it means nothing, mainly because nobody knows what the next level actually looks like and thus whether or not they’ve reached it
Going forward – loose, meaningless and overused
To 'Action' something - how about simply 'doing' it?
Touch base - about as meaningful as ‘let's do lunch’
Circle back - to catch up later
Blue-sky thinking – like 'thinking outside the box' they both translate as 'doing your job'
Brainstorm – just like 'thought showers', totally meaningless
Low hanging fruit - means nothing, as no one knows what tasks are actually being referred to
Get the ball rolling - simply means 'begin'
Drill down - not, as one might think, anything to do with heavy machinery
End of play - curious strain of kiddy-talk in bureaucratese
Deliverables – the postman always rings twice, especially with your e-bay parcel
Issues – no, they’re problems
Leverage – ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the world’, said Archimedes. He didn't say he would leverage the deliverables matrix
Stakeholders - wooden-spike-wielding vampire hunters
Competencies – nope, it’s ‘abilities’ or ‘skills’
Sunset – why call a spade a spade when you can cloy an euphemism?
Core Competency – the opposite of core mediocrity, itself the specialism of any self-respecting HR person, occupying, as they all tend to, another planet
Buy-In – what some unqualified manager asks if you’ll do after the fact because he didn’t value you enough to discuss it with you in the first place
Empower – the misspelling of a utility company
Corporate Values – sorry, but corporations don’t have any values; the people who run them do. And they're usually all just about making money
Scalable – the venture capitalist’s business nirvana craving
Solution - usually refers to a collection of technologies too abstract or complex to describe in a way that anyone would care about if they were explained in plain English
Leverage - the granddaddy of nouns converted to verbs and it really just means the way Michael O’Leary of RyanAir extracts money from passengers
Vertical – a painful expression referring to a specific area of expertise
Robust - a cup of good coffee is robust. A software program, like the banking system, is not
Giving 110% - to tell someone to give more than 100% is to also tell them that you failed maths in school
Take it to the next level - in practice, it means nothing, mainly because nobody knows what the next level actually looks like and thus whether or not they’ve reached it
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