Time to end bad language in the workplace

A new book called 'Who Touched Base in My Thought Shower?' by Steven Poole explores the murky world of office jargon and concludes, rightly, that it is both "horrible and damaging". You can hardly open a newspaper nowadays without reading about board members getting all their ducks in a row in order to develop synergies with their key stakeholders going forward. Here's a real-life example of jargon I came across recently. It's the marketing blurb from a recruitment consultant: "We work at a strategic level to understand an organisation's human capital needs so that targeted solutions can be designed and implemented to meet business objectives." In other words: "We are a recruitment consultant." An increasing number of wacky phrases are entering the management lexicon. Where on earth did "I'll float it on the matrix" (meaning "I'll ask around") come from? And how did "disambiguate" (which, ironically, means "clarify") enter the language? Many executives nowadays seem to be so busy visualising a way to extend the reach of the value chain that it is amazing they have any time left to bulletproof their infrastructure or gain an insight into the segmentation of their go-to-market offering. One director at a presentation I went to announced, with a perfectly straight face: "The incremental skills we put into our organisation will deepen our industry verticals." Well, quite. As well as employing unintelligible jargon, many managers also appear to have gone superlative-crazy. Products aren't merely good anymore; they're outstanding, exceptional or ground-breaking. That is, of course, assuming the company admits to supplying anything as mundane as a product – manufacturers rarely seem to make them nowadays; instead, they prefer to offer 'end-to-end solutions'. Jargon has also crept into the way some managers think of their customers. Of course, enlightened companies clearly recognise the importance of customer focus, but since when have customers become 'key consumer commercial assets'? And, it's all very well to delight your customers, but is it really necessary to develop a passion for them? That sort of behaviour can get you arrested. The truth is that arcane management talk, routinely trotted out by slick company directors only serves to obscure the real competitive issues we all face. On one level, this kind of inane drivel is quite comical. On another it highlights the real difficulty some companies have with communication and is often a cover for management incompetence. Sadly, it is not just jargon that is on the rise. Use of its close relative – the management euphemism – is also growing, often as a way of masking unpalatable actions or covering up the ugly truth. For example, managers no longer fire people; rather, they ramp down the operation, de-size the business, engage in synergy-related headcount restructuring, or even create payroll orphans. And losses aren't simply losses anymore; they have become negative returns. Surely it's time to stamp out the rampant and uncontrolled use of gobbledygook in corporate life and return to plain speaking. Here's a heads up – next time someone tells you that the new IT system is on the runway and will be big banged in quarter three, perhaps you should politely suggest that, its time they engaged in a terminological paradigm shift in order to remain onside and maintain their presence in the loop.