Skip to main content

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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Season for all men

Well, we’re used to hearing about the Camping Season , which for Scouts runs from approximately 31st March to 31st October each year, although Graham Norton’s camping season lasts all year. Then there’s the Caravan Season , where Jeremy Clarkson spends six months with extremely high blood pressure as he tries to overtake them on the A38 in an excruciatingly expensive and completely unnecessary car. The Japanese have their Scientific Season, which was a series of sporadic weeks where they slaughtered endangered whales for scientific research, the results of which seem to be a closely guarded world-secret. This season now looks set, thanks to a group of spineless, land-locked countries threatened by the Land of the Rising Scientific Research with paying more for their Nintendos and PlayStations, to last until the final whale is wiped off the face of the oceans. I have written to the Japanese Embassy four times now seeking details of this research (email address info@l...

"Q". My name is Bond. Oh. not THAT Q.

I was sent a story today by a friend who knows my feelings on the subject - that is, about one of the consummately greatest of all British activities, namely, queuing. It seems some Danish Professor or other has come up with the theory that those who queue the longest should actually be served the last. He claims it makes purchasing something altogether more efficient and smooth through the idea of 'contra-queuing' (whatever the devil that may mean). 'Serve the people at the back of the queue first', he says, with profound wisdom. Altogether very professorial, albeit demonstrating a somewhat keen lack of understanding of the purchasing psyche. The Nobel Prize-chasing Prof suggests that if, for example, a popular entertainment act was to announce a tour, with tickets going on sale at 11am one morning, using the theory of 'contra-queuing', no one will want to be first to buy said tickets. So no one will turn up 14 months in advance and venues will...

"Pre-" . . . . . good grief!!!!!!!!!

I was looking through the Guardian this morning and noticed a position being advertised that I thought I'd take a closer look at. The first sentence, when clicking the link to apply was: "If you are registered, please log in and we will pre-fill this form for you." What is the current fixation with the prefix "pre" . It is everywhere, turning perfectly reasonable statements into total and utter gibberish! I would have thought that for one of our major quality newspapers, instead of "please log in and we will pre-fill this form for you" it would have been much more sensible to have something along the lines of "please log in and your details will be automatically filled in for you". It is the rip-off Britain merchants who have embraced this particular prefix with a vengeance. They have nonsensically slapped it in front of the word " order " so that the moment an overpriced games console, war game for that console, phone,...