Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
For example - let's say your boss decides to introduce some mandatory meeting that everyone agrees is useless. Rather then complaining about it in normal language, I would say things like "well, one of our core values is delighting clients, which I would be able to do much more efficiently if we would iterate on our process and try to optimize the time currently used by this meeting".
The example is intentionally simplified and the response is exaggerated, but you get the point - they are the ones encouraging you to use those phrases, which makes it more difficult for them to push back when you do it against them.
The only real risk is a coworker bursting into laughter in the middle of such an exchange.
I think it's natural to want to speak in a language or style which one might think others approve. However, I have found that while many managers are apt to use biz-speak/buzzwords themselves, it's not necessarily what they want to hear from others.
If you can instead speak in clear, concise, and empathetic sentences that get to the point, most people really appreciate and crave that-- especially when things are critical. Unfortunately that's very hard to do. There's a fine line between getting to the point and coming off as a cold-fish personality. It takes lots of practice.
They use that language as a front for insecurity, not knowing what to say, or not being willing to say what they really mean. If the PHB is obfuscating an unpalatable (and non-negotiable) demand in biz-speak, it's not like parroting back some biz-speak is going to change his mind or strong-arm him.
You chances are better if you address the actual issues in plain and sensible language (or perhaps don't say anything at all). Even if it doesn't work, it at least lays bare the insincerity of the PHB's biz-speak.
Describing pushing back on push-back with "push back".
Oh, stealing signs doesn't align with your team's values. We benefited from it greatly for years, but it doesn't align with our values since we got caught.
It's like an amoral organization's PR version of "my mamma taught me better than that". Some juvenile delinquent gets caught stealing from the store and he says, "I don't know why I did that. That's not me, that's not who I am, I'm not a thief. My momma taught me better than that." If he incorporated himself, he could've said, his actions did not align with his values. Problem solved.
The problem you’re outlining here is that people often use the word while lying.
"The values we all shares are fundamental"
We all know the meaning of the word values used in this sentence. we don't know it means what in this context, though. Am i talking about freedom? Equality? Somehing else?
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-...
I don't understand why your post is phrased so negatively. Some buzzwords have a sort of standardised meaning across a company so everyone knows what you're talking about.
"We agreed that delighting clients is important and I argue that I can better optimize it by not attending" There is nothing wrong with this?
Sure I'd agree customer satisfaction is a much better word for it.
I wouldn't call all the sugarcoating effective communication as I expect everyone in the company to understand that not wasting people's time will let them do more work and benefit the customer in the end.
Of course you would be. Why does it have to phrased in some extremely positive or negative way? Why not something like "I'm pretty busy working on x. If anything comes up in the meeting that needs my attention let me know afterwards and I'll arrange a time to chat."
A boss that conducts a useless meeting, knowing it's to hear themselves talk while knowing their subordinates are busy with important tasks that actually keep the company afloat is generally considered, and this is the technical term, a dick maneuver. His/her choice to have a time wasting meeting greatly increases the chances of those employees having to work overtime to accomplish a task on schedule, cutting into their family/personal time. Since most of these types of jobs are salary, there's no overtime pay. So yes, negativity is important in this matter. Why cuddle someone who wants to waste other people's time just to hear themselves speak and have some artificial self-important time?
...
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...
In short it's pure manipulation of your own tendencies for social cooperation. Perhaps a bit colorful to say on HN but--it's fucking disgusting. And multiple fields of high-paying professions consist entirely of doing this effectively, up to the scale of entire nations.
> From my time in investment banking I can easily believe that most investment banking transactions occur because investment bankers are pretending to do what investment bankers do, acting out scenes from “Liar’s Poker” until they start to seem real. I don’t know why investment banking would be different from any other industry. So sure, yeah, work is a kind of pretense.
Those places are fun to work in, especially if you have already found another job and you are counting the days before you walk out the door.
To native English speakers I advice to try at least once in their career an employer with English as a business language but not headquartered in any Anglosphere country, where English is a second language to the most employees - the communication dynamics in such environments is quite different and the American corporate newspeak doesn't stick.
Consider this excerpt from an interview [2] with Steven Chang and David Kosak done on February 6, 2020 regarding the Galakrond's Awakening expansion for Hearthstone after the players complained about the game being unbalanced:
>In terms of the minor balance changes we’ve been doing recently, it’s something where we want to try and see where we can strike that balance where the community feels happy about it without introducing too much change so that the game feels completely different. This is a fine line to walk, and we will always be watching and listening to the community about the amount and timings of changes.
No actual detail is given on anything, it's all empty feelgood sentences. Entire paragraphs go on like this, stating opinions and desires as outlined in the DoMJ:
>Statements of desires – A statement that something is hoped for does not imply any action is to be taken to ensure the desired outcome. Example: I want us all to be happy with our compensation.
1. http://dictionaryofmanagementjargon.yolasite.com/
2. https://www.hearthstonetopdecks.com/interview-with-hearthsto...
People use overly-elaborate language to appear intelligent or innovative, too. I once spent some time learning a martial art whose founder had replaced all of the standard names for movement and techniques with novel, quasi-technical-sounding ones.
"Multiple attackers" became "plural assailants", "breathing technique" became "respiratory enhancement". "Sparring" became "fisticuffs". Etc.
It was maddening, because he would correct students who slipped up and failed to use his terminology.
https://www.usadojo.com/ross-performance-enhancement-system/
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-...
Simply put I would stay far away from articles and people thinking the way Venkatesh Rao exhibits here. Highly toxic and inhumane management bullshit.
It's a hilarious and dark read, and certainly has grains of truth, but framing your worldview around that is silly and dangerous.
Rao is a good writer, but he's filtering a parody comic through a parody show, with additions from Dilbert (another parody), and supplements the arguments with examples from management gurus of questionable relevance. It's like Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra, where it's a simulation (parody) filtered through another simulation filtered through another simulation until you have something that doesn't reflect reality.
> Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes. When the Digital Equipment Corporation eliminated 3,000 jobs its statement didn’t mention layoffs; those were “involuntary methodologies.” When an Air Force missile crashed, it “impacted with the ground prematurely.”
When I was a youngster in the Army Cadets in Australia I was told by one of the regular Army seargeants that no one in his company was ever “lost”. They could be “temporarily spatially displaced” but getting lost was strictly forbidden.
I think the reason that business jargon gets more flak than usual jargon is because it does not really facilitate faster communication. At least not to everyone involved. Maybe salesman to salesman, business dev to business dev, it would make sense. But then they use that jargon with everyone else (i.e., when it is not appropriate to) and it sounds just as ridiculous as when they hear a dev say "We can't do that without considerable infrastructure overhaul. The current LTS is still a year away from EOL but the vendor has decided to use incompatible dependencies anyway".
If that were me, I'd just say "There's a lot of work involved to make that happen. We're talking 60-hour work weeks if you want that deadline." Or something like that. And if you hear me use the former wording in a meeting with non-technical people involved, you can bet it's just me trying to sound relevant to the meeting (because the next question would be "Could you elaborate?" and I will use more jargon, which will cause a cycle of explanation and boy won't I look important?)
It's ridiculous for me to hear "We need to get this done because we want to capture this market and turn this vertical into a core competency. This will make our portfolio more attractive to investors." when you can just say "Our client really needs/wants these features. We risk losing them if we don't deliver by the deadline."
There's also something to be said about weird turns of phrase that make communications sound less personal. Whereas I would just say "As I already told you," business-speak will make me use "As per my last email...". I don't know about others but the first time I encountered "As per my last email", it did feel foreign to me, like it's not English anymore. Modesty aside, I've read a lot, fiction and nonfiction, but only in my work inbox will I find "As per my last email".
There are memes floating around that joke that common businesspeak phrases like this are just polite ways to phrase insults, and that's only a little bit of an exaggeration. In my experience, when someone says "as per my last email", it is a very thinly-veiled version of "are you too stupid to understand what I just told you?".
But you have to keep civil in a business environment because a) money is on the line and b) you're going to have to keep interacting with the same people for a long time.
Isn't this just the "As I've written in my last letter" for the e-mail era? Maybe it's just a cultural difference. (In my native language - and probably because of that in English too - I try use the verbs corresponding to the medium, so if I wrote to someone then I'll refer to that communication as "as you probably read" instead of "heard", and so on.)
It might as well be. It just always struck me as wrong usage, for lack of better term. "Per", to me, is always in the sense of "for each": per month, per head, etc.
That said, I decided to look it up. And quoting from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/as%20per:
> Is It Grammatically Correct to Say _as per_?
> ...The more ponderous as per is often found in business and legal prose, or in writing that attempts to adopt a formal tone. It is not incorrect to use, but some find it overly legalistic and counsel avoiding it for that reason. On the other hand, it has been used to good effect in facetious mock-business-English ("as per the President’s shiny new Environmental Policy Act"). ...
Looks like I'm not the only one who was puzzled by this turn of phrase. You learn new things everyday. :)
(edit: formatting)
As a native English speaker, if I encounter this phrase I take it to suggest I am not paying attention.
In my working lifetime, having people occupying managerial roles that have zero relevant shop floor experience, has gone (or at least feels to have gone) from being the exception, to the absolute norm. Therefore in my experience, this, combined with the point you started with, is the nub of the matter.
Managers when faced with not having a clue what a team in a field that naturally has its own jargon are talking about, are desperate to recover the balance of power. Thus they end up speaking a language designed to to exclude all apart from those who submit to their influence and join in.
Related: coverage of the recent cum-ex scandals has often included the factoid that "cum-ex" is from the Latin for "with-without".
Of course this isn't true. While cum is Latin for "with", the Latin for "without" is sine -- ex is Latin for "from". Instead, as used in the name of the scandal and the operations behind it, ex is ordinary English financial jargon for "without".
As originally used in the financial jargon ex-dividend date, ex is used correctly and has the sense "after (in time)". That is, if you buy something ex-dividend, the dividend has already been paid (you're buying after the payment), and so you won't get it. [1] It's sense II in Lewis and Short ( http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... ) (Note sense II.A.2, which gives us the more vernacular English prefix ex-, as in ex-wife.)
"Outside" is not even one of the many senses of ex in Latin; ex always has a sense related to the core concept of "from". "Outside" is extra.
[1] For some reason, the ex-dividend date is one day before the actual payment, but the idea is still that you're buying after the date of the dividend.
>> [The ex-date] is the day after holders of the security are entitled to the dividend.
> It's not the day when holders are entitled to the dividend because if you trade on a particular day, you don't own the securities until settlement occurs
Imagine that the ex-date for a security is 2017-05-19. You sell one such security on 2017-05-18. Settlement clears on 2017-05-22. Because of the delay in settlement, you held the security on the ex-date (and on the day before the ex-date), but you're not entitled to the dividend because you sold the security before the ex-date.
That's my reading of the two comments. I take no position on this. The point I'm making is different, that in the phrase "ex-dividend date", the "ex" and the "dividend" are not related to each other. They both relate to "date"; "ex-dividend" is not a logical unit within the phrase. However, the phrase "ex-dividend date" (good Latin usage) was clipped to "ex-dividend", and then people started assuming "ex" meant "without", because an "ex-dividend security" (no longer good Latin usage) was one that traded without rights to the dividend.
Stated another way --
A "dividend date" is a kind of date, a date related to the concept "dividend". "Ex-dividend date" is (originally) a prepositional phrase meaning "after the dividend date". It's not a kind of date related to the concept "ex-dividend"; "ex-dividend" is not a concept.
But then, English-speaking traders who didn't know Latin reanalyzed the phrase "ex-dividend date" as a noun phrase referring to a kind of date, which required a further reanalysis of what exactly "ex" meant. That new meaning, "without", is original to English.
In tree form, we have an original phrase (ex-(dividend date)) being reanalyzed as ((ex-dividend) date).
That's right. The ex date is relevant to the day you trade (which in practice means entering into a contract to buy and sell securities at a certain price, not actually delivering those securities/money), whereas the record date is the equivalent for the day of ownership. The ex date will be X-1 business days before the record date with X and the definition of business day depending on the market settlement convention. In some markets X=1 hence the confusion between the two, I think.
Corporate-speak is something different though to me - it's purpose is not to convey any specific meaning but simply to posture, which is why it's so widely hated.
Also the "North Star" one, whew, shudder is correct. Let's bury that one forever.
What disappointed me more, though, is that the examples are just not very strong. I was hoping for examples far more juicy and over the top than the tired "disrupt" and "pivot".
The author of this article is nearly vindictive in her complete portrayal that these words are vapid buzzwords that children use to appear adult and bewilder and fake their way through a paltry corporate existence.
You take away these words and people stop thinking out loud and with each other about productive ideas, analyses, directions and workflows that come from using all of the English language and not just what The Atlantic deems is above fakery.
Articles and corporate minded speech crimes like this make being your own boss mandatory, given you want to own your own mind and speech.
And it also got right that when workers hide behind this language others (and the work too) usually suffer.
Of course there never is "all general business speak". Every big company has a local lingo full of bullshit, acronyms, abbreviations, phrases and so on. HR, legal, CSR, marketing and sales - so basically pieces of broadcast style communication has a lot of similarity in them, but .. that's it.
Whether or not people are awake to what these words are meant to mean, they still have an impact. Mission statements and company wide training getting you to repeat the words they wish you to say, has an impact on you.
Disrupting and breaking things gives lower rungs of the organization license (when misused) to interrupt progress and deflect technical debt. The further you get from what it is supposed to mean, it can be applied more broadly and in a less targeted fashion, undermining it's original purpose but still having an effect.
Those broad and diluted changes in behaviour that stems from these annoyingly 'untouchable' and 'business speak' words can be beneficial. Were you to need to skip the investment in making proper technically complete products and instead needed to move quickly and could tolerate accruing technical debt, then "installing" the words disruption and breaking things and other buzzwords changes how people talk to each other, how they think in English whilst at work and how they behave when they are unable to guide their own actions past or around certain words.
Railing against buzzwords isn't going to disappear them, taking them out of your conscious perception is only going to make them stronger in directing the flow of business by amplifying the effect of the new wave of words you can't say whilst everyone around you focuses on 'stupidity' instead of 'alignment' (for example). In that case building large systems with less technical debt and more single-purpose easy-to-maintain pieces is much easier when you don't care how 'disruptive' people are and instead care when they are stupid enough to introduce technical debt.
Another day, another past set of cultural tools erased and new ones installed. Say hi to the new boss, same as the old one. It's amazing watching the internet and culture at large walk in conformist lockstep.
> As the leaked Slacks make clear, Korey, as well as her employees, were working under the new conditions of surveillance-state capitalism (or, from the company’s perspective, a culture of “inclusion and transparency”). One reason for the uptick in garbage language is exactly this sense of nonstop supervision. Employers can read emails and track keystrokes and monitor locations and clock the amount of time their employees spend noodling on Twitter. In an environment of constant auditing, it’s safer to use words that signify nothing and can be stretched to mean anything, just in case you’re caught and required to defend yourself.
https://www.thecut.com/2020/02/spread-of-corporate-speak.htm...
Especially if you use git or svn, given that “git revert” and “svn revert” exist.
We can table this discussion for now. Lets take it offline.