Why Do Corporations Speak the Way They Do? (vulture.com) 157
An anonymous reader shares a article: Anna Wiener, author of memoir "Uncanny Valley", writes especially well -- with both fluency and astonishment -- about the verbal habits of her peers: "People used a sort of nonlanguage, which was neither beautiful nor especially efficient: a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime metaphors, inflated with self-importance. Calls to action; front lines and trenches; blitzscaling. Companies didn't fail, they died." She describes a man who wheels around her office on a scooter barking into a wireless headset about growth hacking, proactive technology, parallelization, and the first-mover advantage. "It was garbage language," Wiener writes, "but customers loved him." I know that man, except he didn't ride a scooter and was actually a woman named Megan at yet another of my former jobs. What did Megan do? Mostly she set meetings, or "syncs," as she called them. They were the worst kind of meeting -- the kind where attendees circle the concept of work without wading into the substance of it.
Megan's syncs were filled with discussions of cadences and connectivity and upleveling as well as the necessity to refine and iterate moving forward. The primary unit of meaning was the abstract metaphor. I don't think anyone knew what anyone was saying, but I also think we were all convinced that we were the only ones who didn't know while everyone else was on the same page. In Megan's syncs, I found myself becoming almost psychedelically disembodied, floating above the conference room and gazing at the dozen or so people within as we slumped, bit and chewed extremities, furtively manipulated phones, cracked knuckles, examined split ends, scratched elbows, jiggled feet, palpated stomach rolls, disemboweled pens, and gnawed on shirt collars. The sheer volume of apathy formed an energy of its own, like a mudslide. At the half-hour mark of each hour-long meeting, our bodies began to list perceptibly toward the door. It was like the whole room had to pee. When I tried to translate Megan's monologues in real time, I could feel my brain aching in a physical manner, the way it does when I attempt to understand blockchain technology or do my taxes.
Megan's syncs were filled with discussions of cadences and connectivity and upleveling as well as the necessity to refine and iterate moving forward. The primary unit of meaning was the abstract metaphor. I don't think anyone knew what anyone was saying, but I also think we were all convinced that we were the only ones who didn't know while everyone else was on the same page. In Megan's syncs, I found myself becoming almost psychedelically disembodied, floating above the conference room and gazing at the dozen or so people within as we slumped, bit and chewed extremities, furtively manipulated phones, cracked knuckles, examined split ends, scratched elbows, jiggled feet, palpated stomach rolls, disemboweled pens, and gnawed on shirt collars. The sheer volume of apathy formed an energy of its own, like a mudslide. At the half-hour mark of each hour-long meeting, our bodies began to list perceptibly toward the door. It was like the whole room had to pee. When I tried to translate Megan's monologues in real time, I could feel my brain aching in a physical manner, the way it does when I attempt to understand blockchain technology or do my taxes.
Makes sense to me (Score:4, Funny)
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Time to do a deep-dive on the greenfields to synergize our verticals!
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Came here for this video. Impressed it was the first post. Well played, sir.
Bullshit Bingo (Score:5, Insightful)
Sweet! Does that mean we get a new edition of Bullshit Bingo cards?
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I learned this phrase many years ago from a salesman:
If you can't bedazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
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For instance, "first-mover advantage" is an important concept in business, and there isn't a simpler term that has the same meaning.
Bullshit. It has a military term and i've known it in business for 20 years.
The Initiative. Apple had the initiative in smartphones, but android won the race to the bottom despite coming in later.
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I also think it's funny that you protest against "first-mover advantage" when your example sentence uses "race to the bottom" which is metaphor.
It is, and trust me, I love a good metaphor.
But I struggled with "Race to the Bottom."
Walmart it?
"...but Android walmarted it and won the cheap phone market" ...nah, too cumbersome.
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I think 'Walmarting' is pretty much limited to "screwing over your employees as much as possible without having all of them quit the same day". At least that's the way I've heard it used.
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Or alternately, "have the government effectively pay part of your employee's paycheck".
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I can't imagine how embarrassing it must be to be stuck as the HR person in a Walmart store.
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You're trying to compare two different nouns. The word "initiative" is the first sense is an advantage one holds, and in the second case, it's planned course of action.
They're not the same word.
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*The* initiative. Not an initiative. Although I might suggest "a head start" as being less pretentious than both.
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Bullshit. It has a military term and i've known it in business for 20 years.
The Initiative.
"Initiative" and "first-mover advantage" are two different things.
For instance, Apple had the initiative in smartphones because the company with the first-mover advantage (which wasn't Apple) became complacent.
Apple just took a bunch of pre-existing ideas, put them together in a nice package, and marketed it well.
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For instance, "first-mover advantage" is an important concept in business, and there isn't a simpler term that has the same meaning.
But how often does it really need to be used in meetings? That's the real point here. That's a term to be used once at project inception and never heard again.
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"We need to do this first before other companies do it!" That wasn't so hard, was it?
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It's all in how t's used.
Synergize our customer interaction efforts means nothing,
There is no synergy between Engineering and Sales says it all.
Re:Bullshit Bingo (Score:4, Insightful)
So you can recognize when synergy is absent, but simply saying "these areas need to synergize" isn't as helpful because it doesn't address what exactly needs to be done to accomplish that.
In the military I was told that I could bitch about a thing as much as I wanted...as long as I had something constructive to say about how to fix it. In business people seem to have gotten around this rule by just making everything an abstract, then reacting as needed to keep themselves from looking bad when things aren't implemented in a favorable fashion.
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Synergy does mean something - however it is so amazingly overused that it's nearly meaningless in business. Ie, including a web browser with your operating system is synergy, the two will promote each other. But making sure that all corporate divisions agree on a common mission statement is not synergy. But overall, synergy is something that often happens unexpectedly by itself, rather not through deliberate actions.
jargon is just compression (a labeled subroutine) (Score:3)
This word coining is just a form of domain-specific compression of communication that uses a single label for often-referenced complex concepts.
In software, we're guilty of jargon (compressions) such as IDE, refactoring, DRY, APIs, OKRs, etc etc etc and of course TLA.
Re:jargon is just compression (a labeled subroutin (Score:5, Insightful)
Not corporate speak, that's designed not for brevity, but for bafflement. It uses words that sound like they might mean something important, but don't. Tech jargon means something to anyone who has been in the business for a few years. Corporate speak means nothing, on purpose. It is not a method of communicating more succinctly, it is a method of sounding important and knowledgeable when you don't know what the fuck is going on.
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Re:jargon is just compression (a labeled subroutin (Score:5, Interesting)
I would argue that, even when corporate speak started with some clever idea (synergy, say) it was eaten up and shat out, then eaten again, and shat out again, by ever stupider and stupider people, until it means absolutely nothing. It's paying lip service to a vague idea that no one using the language really understands, let alone plans to implement.
Basically, corporate speak is a sort of shibboleth. It lets other corporate drones and middle managers know you are one of them.
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I think its more an invention of slimy consultant types who use it to peddle their worthless systems to unwary management. Like the board room equivalent to the turboencabulator. The idiots ate it up not knowing what it was and then regurgitated it on the rest of the world. This reinforces the consultant's position because now an army of mouth breathing drones are echoing this made up language further cementing their credibility.
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Corporate bullshit is just like pseudoscience. Someone comes up with a "theory" and invents a bunch of fancy BS to make it sound good. Mix in some pop psychology and Ayn Rand fanfic, babble it at a sales conference or something, and you've got a winner. It resonates with the zeitgeist, the synergies multiply, and suddenly the Earth has four days simultaneously every rotation while everyone else is still erroneously measuring time from one corner.
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I wouldn't say that corporate speak means nothing, some of them words are rather ambiguous but others are pretty specific; these are used to impress a sense of importance, expertise or decisiveness, but everyone else around the table will know what they mean. For instan
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Yeah, I'm with you on dogfood. Who eats dogfood? Not happy people. It's gross. I'd understand if it was "use our own shampoo" or "wear our own clothes" even, but dogfood? Yuck.
Re: jargon is just compression (a labeled subrouti (Score:3)
I think that's the point. It's "dogfood" precisely because the company _hasn't_ eaten it themselves. If they tasted the product themselves, they'd realise that it's only fit for dogs. Then (the theory goes) they would improve the product.
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I think the point is that if you're forced to eat your own dogfood, you'll put in the effort to make it something more palatable... and therefore no longer dogfood.
Re:jargon is just compression (a labeled subroutin (Score:4, Interesting)
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And if you're capable of formulating a clear and concise explanation in your own words, on the spot, you've probably internalized the concept itself and not just the words.
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Yup. Read Einstein's book on relativity sometime. Clear and concise. Then listen to any of the half baked descriptions of it you can find everywhere.
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I understand what corporate jargon is supposed to mean more than most of the people using it. Most managers are fucking idiots, just mediocre people who have failed up in life, or the type that was born on third and think they hit a triple. Maybe there is a real meritocracy somewhere in this crazy world, but you won't find it in corporate America. It's a clique of sociopaths and rich morons protecting their strange hold on the lucrative and important positions in our society, to the detriment of everyone bu
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Experienced is more like it.
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I make plenty in a secure and rewarding job, have family that loves me, and in most respects, I am happy with my life.
It may surprise you, but some people actually care about justice, even if they are comfortable and not suffering injustice personally. It's one thing that makes the human race special, the fact that we care for others.
You might want to try it, most non sociopaths find caring about others reduces depression and feelings of empty sadness.
Tell me, what do you think Oskar Schindler felt? Why did
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Believe what you like if it makes you happy. Why should I care what is in your head?
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You either missed the point of the article, or didn't read it.
The shit referred to here isn't Jargon. Jargon has technical meaning. These words/phrases often have either no meaning, no agreed meaning, or a meaning that no one can actually explain.
The purpose of these words and phrases seems to simply
You're probably just not conversant (Score:2)
Of course it's always inapropriate to use a particular domain's jargon when communicating with a wider audience. That's probably the root problem with these kind of meetings described. Business jargon is being used in meetings containing techies.
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I'm conversant in many domains, and I have to deal with these people all the time.
It's not difficult to derive the meaning of their "Jargon" (that is to say, there isn't one.)
It's also easy to test-
You sit in board meetings, right? (Me too)
The next time someone starts playing buzzword bingo- call them out on it.
Ask them precisely what it means to benchmark a proactive customer val
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"front lines,trenches" - clear, if annoyingly militaristic, the people in the organization who'se role works directly with the technology, or the product assembly etc, or works directly with customers. As opposed to managers, executives.
"blitzscaling" - clear if annoyingly militaristic - scaling really, insanely fast, in a manner wh
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As I thought.
You're applying common sense translations to garbage language.
Unfortunately, you're wrong about their meaning.
Every one of those words has a different meaning for whoever is saying them.
Shit, just look at your definition of "Growth hacking"
It's nearly as non-sensical as the term itself.
"Advanced online marketing technology", "Business-process technology and best-practices", "intelligently, rapidly grow a startup company based on being a learning organization that takes advantage
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Yes but unlike business jargon, software jargon actually has meaning. :D
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There's been an alarming trend of bullshit masquerading as technical jargon though. I think it comes from much the same source: people who have very little idea what they're doing trying to impress each other. Read some of the descriptions of web frameworks for example (I know, low hanging fruit).
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We must all efficiently
Operationalize our strategies
Invest in world-class technology
And leverage our core competencies
In order to holistically administrate
Exceptional synergy
I disagree. Corporate-speak is unique from industry specific jargon. In most cases you are right. Its about being concise with niche complex concepts. And there are such things in the business world too. But they are very specific to individual disciplines, HR, Finance, Sales, Management etc all have industry specific jargon. But "corpo
Bullshit vocabulary for disguise (Score:3)
Re: Bullshit vocabulary for disguise (Score:3)
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Absolutely spot on. Lots of people holding down jobs they don't deserve by spouting mindless BS and marching around with a folder full of papers. They never get anything practical done 'cos they spend all day avoiding any serious work and responsibility.
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Meetings to set the agenda for the next meeting so they can have another meeting to go over the minutes from that meeting.
This bullshit -- the procurement process can take a year. Demoing software? six months. It's... beyond counter-productive.
But then, that's what bureaucracy is all *really* about -- doing nothing while looking like doing everything while understaffed, so you get more people and repeat ad infinitum.
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Ah, you've worked for an insurance company. I have never in my life seen such a large collection of useless, overpaid, underperforming people assembled in one place. One insurance company we put a security system in for had a position called "Software Archivist", I kid you not.
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I think one of the sources of a *lot* of corporate evil is the question "how many people do you have working under you?" Whenever someone tries to impress me with their number I open my eyes wide and say "my goodness, with all those people, this is what you get done?"
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Much of it is just creating new verbs out of nouns and adjectives where no verb previously existed, a simple formula for the trendy office douchebag.
A good example is the first comment I saw here where an AC jokingly pointed to link that had the word "operationalize". Who makes this stuff up?
Some of the buzzwords and buzzphrases metaphors aren't too bad, like "on the same page" I suppose, but most are just pretentious snot: "Let's take this discussion offline".. you mean, I'll talk to you after the meet
Dilbert & Corporate America (Score:3)
Unfortunately, I'm now making about 1/3 my salary of 20 years ago.
To leverage synergies, of course. (Score:4, Funny)
Bob, you can effort that right? Where are we?
Re:To leverage synergies, of course. (Score:4, Funny)
Bob, you can effort that right? Where are we?
Nope, not enough bandwidth. Give it to June, her bluesky session ends this Thursday, and she's quite good at efforting short-term integration campaigns.
Re: To leverage synergies, of course. (Score:3)
Thanks for contextualizing the workproduct for the team. Gotta run; I have a :30 in 5.
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Can you bring some extra chairs for the standup?
Mu (Score:3)
Corporations don't speak. Corporate mouthpieces make statements on their behalf after they are approved by the legal department.
Corporate officers support corporatism. Duh.
Buzzword Bingo! (Score:4, Insightful)
In my experience you don't see this kind of thing in companies where the CEO/Founder/manager knows what they're doing or, at the very least, what they want. (I've been fortunate enough to work for 2) They'll speak in concrete terms and look for concrete goals and results.
You get the nebulous corporate buzzword stuff when the CEO has an idealized goal (we want to be #1 in the marketplace) but no idea of how to achieve that discreetly so they fall back on strategy terms "We will do this by executing on our sales goals in a more efficient manner"
Then you have the cargo cultists that don't even recognize that but just mimick terms they're heard as they're trying to fake it til they make it. (We need to use electrolytes in our next product because it's got what plants crave).
Ultimately it's not "corporate language" per se - it's people trying to communicate using terms and concepts they don't fully understand and you'll see this phenomenon everywhere - like playing D&D with new players. Or how new terms come into use like "aggro" or "pr0n"... or "goatse"
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Such things exist??? They are unicorn companies as far as I'm concerned...
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There's a certain amount of luck involved - I thought I would never find another job like the 1st one. Note that neither job lasted. The CEO of the first one "outgrew" the position and started adopting buzzword goals to try to appear bigger than he was. I went through a dearth of jobs for many years until joining the new company (whose tech was not something I was interested in but I was burned out and they made a good offer- I was surprised at how well things worked. CEO #2 left the job to form a new st
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They do exist. I moved to Silicon Valley to find exactly that (a company where the CEO is a founder and not a finance guy who only knows how to optimize taxes) and I know I'll have a hard time moving to another company now.
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They're not that rare. They're primarily small companies that aren't started by a couple of douches who want to be "founders" and aren't desperately chasing venture capitalists around.
Okay, maybe rare in tech.
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Ultimately it's not "corporate language" per se - it's people trying to communicate using terms and concepts they don't fully understand and you'll see this phenomenon everywhere - like playing D&D with new players. Or how new terms come into use like "aggro" or "pr0n"... or "goatse"
Honestly, I think I'd be much happier if I didn't fully understand or even had no idea what the term "goatse" was meant to communicate.
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They'll speak in concrete terms and look for concrete goals and results.
Examples: Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos
no idea of how to achieve that discreetly so they fall back on strategy terms
Examples: Michael Eisner and Carly Fiorina
Business life is just one long BS festival! (Score:5, Insightful)
Most companies and businesses are full of mindless morons "pushing paper" just to keep their jobs. There's a whole ton of people out there just making work for others so they can ride high on a fat salary and bulging pension while the rest of us work. They use bullshit language, tie others up in verbal knots and no one wants to appear stupid so they never question the bullshit they spew out and they simply get elevated to management positions where they can do less damage to the company. They spend all their time passing the buck and fending of any responsibility. The whole of western business runs like this, if we ever culled these bullshit artists then about 60% of the workforce would be redundant in a split second.
35 years of working the IT industry has taught me that it's just full of bullshitters, mornic managers, people with more certifications and college degrees than brain cells, there are few diamonds in the rough that keep companies running and you know when a company is about to fail, they make all the "diamonds" redundant.
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https://www.c-span.org/video/?... [c-span.org]
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Most companies and businesses are full of mindless morons "pushing paper" just to keep their jobs. There's a whole ton of people out there just making work for others so they can ride high on a fat salary and bulging pension while the rest of us work.
Huh. I must be lucky. In 30 years at enterprise hardware and software companies, I don't think I've encountered anyone who didn't have a plausible story of how what they were doing was valuable, nor anyone who seemed to be coasting to retirement. And if they didn't have a plausible enough story, they tended to get trimmed in our once-a-decade slowdown and layoff cycles.
For that matter, I haven't seen a pension in decades either. It's 401k's as far as the eye can see. Maybe you're thinking government employe
Mostly she set meetings (Score:3)
Sounds familiar... (Score:2)
....sounds like someone who works in an Agile shop.
I thought I had heard stupid corporate-speak. Then I went to an Agile shop. More corporate-speak and the shittest code/products I had ever seen or heard.
Corporatespeak (Score:2)
She is not the first [dilbert.com] to notice that.
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Came here to post this:
https://dilbert.com/strip/1994... [dilbert.com]
Short Runway. (Score:3)
That's one I picked up at my new job that's now a year old.
Implement a hugely complex project in 3 months, to include selection procurement of a SAN, fiber fabric, servers, etc.
Director: "I realize this is a short runway but we'll do it and we'll save the organization!"
Me: "That's not a runway, that's a postage stamp"
Manager, sent as im to our entire team but not director "We need plan B, this will never happen"
Plan B is our new reality. The runway was so short the pilot couldn't see it.
Our director speaks in Corporatese. We don't.
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lol - I was at a company where the manager said he wanted an absolute realistic schedule for a new project and we were going to stick to it and management was going to back it.
We were a little incredulous but thought this was a new turn for the company and spent 3 weeks going into every detail of what the new project would need, what code had to be written, tests involved, etc; Used some actual mathematical estimation models to try to get a statistically accurate idea of the time involved and came up with
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I have to ask because I work for a company where 90% of the systems are internal to the company, not sold to external users, and the 10% are for company customers. Every project has a hard deadline that must be met because some manager or executive said they either wanted it or could have it by that deadline.
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I was once asked by a marketroid turned manager to estimate a project, and gave an estimate of X man-months plus 3 calendar months for learning curve (It was a new target OS, new tool suite, etc...). Said ex-marketroid literally told me to "work smarter, not harder", and gave me just X.
Project was exactly 3 calendar months late from the "revised" esitmate.
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At a previous job I was sitting in my office and my office mate turns around and says "you know, when I first met you five years ago I thought you were a nice guy, but kind of pessimistic. Then I realized that everything you said would happen around here happened, exactly as you said it would."
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Wow, that is a short runway. We're going to have to jettison whatever we can to shave weight, and we should probably loiter for a while to burn off excess fuel. Since this is more than a little in violation of the AC 150/5325-4B recommendations I hope you have an alternative exit strategy, because we're not going to be using this airplane again.
Bullshit metaphors are more fun when you take them seriously.
"I am not a dog" (Score:4, Interesting)
Sometimes when the neighborhood dogs bark, I think about the cartoon where they joked about this and translated the barks: Dog 1 "I'm a dog". Dog 2 "I'm a dog too!". Dog 3 "I'm also a dog". Dog 1 "I'm a DOG!", and so on.,
That's what it's like at some of those meetings. It's OK... except when you're not a dog. Then it's just a lot of annoying racket. I hear this sometimes too. My neighbor will open up a window and should "SHUT THE FUCK UP!", in perhaps vain hope that the dogs will respond to the human angst, or the owner will hear it and find a way to calm the dogs. Sometimes it works. I've done it myself... but I don't recommend standing up and shouting STFU at an actual meeting, as much as you might like to.
It's what the philosopher H. Frankfurt calls (Score:2)
"bullshit". It's speech that is not intended to convey propositions, but rather *attitude*. Often we conflate this with the inconsequential lies that are often used for this purpose, but people who hear a BS lie usually know it's not supposed to be factually true.
I have a theory that people evolved the ability to bullshit before they evolved the capability of conveying propositional statements. Before we could say things like "The sky is blue" or "All men are mortal," we probably could say things like "O
Newspeak? (Score:2)
The way companies talk about technology on their websites and in articles reminds me of Newspeak from the book "1984" but with the intention of tricking Google's "what will make us the most money" algorithm into giving them higher rankings.
Author falls into the trap of buzzwords herself (Score:5, Interesting)
While I agree there is a lot of BS and buzzwords thrown around in corporations, and I often run into people throwing them around talking for minutes at a time while conveying absolutely nothing at all, the actual example used at the very beginning of the linked article is actually a really bad illustration of it. The author says that “We’re waiting on specs for the San Francisco installation. Can you parallel-path two versions?” is just a pretentious way of saying “We’re waiting on specs for the San Francisco installation. Can you make two versions?”, and goes on to tell how how "there was something gorgeously and inadvertently candid about the phrase’s [parallel-path] assumption". First, parallel-path has actual meaning here and it removes potential ambiguities. It means you want both versions developed and released in parallel, as opposed to consecutively (version 1 in January, Version 2 in March). Second, "gorgeously and inadvertently candid" sounds like a lots artsy buzzwords which add no meaning, or are there different levels of candid, like "gorgeously candid" and "hideously candid"?
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Just like managers, authors have word quotas to meet.
Reminds me of all the times I earned a low or failing grade on my high school essays because I didn't meet the page count requirement. Being terse and concise is great for technical manuals, but is not your ally in a writing class.
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While I agree there is a lot of BS and buzzwords thrown around in corporations, and I often run into people throwing them around talking for minutes at a time while conveying absolutely nothing at all, the actual example used at the very beginning of the linked article is actually a really bad illustration of it. The author says that “We’re waiting on specs for the San Francisco installation. Can you parallel-path two versions?” is just a pretentious way of saying “We’re waiting on specs for the San Francisco installation. Can you make two versions?”, and goes on to tell how how "there was something gorgeously and inadvertently candid about the phrase’s [parallel-path] assumption". First, parallel-path has actual meaning here and it removes potential ambiguities. It means you want both versions developed and released in parallel, as opposed to consecutively (version 1 in January, Version 2 in March). Second, "gorgeously and inadvertently candid" sounds like a lots artsy buzzwords which add no meaning, or are there different levels of candid, like "gorgeously candid" and "hideously candid"?
Excellent points.
Beyond that, although it's really popular among techies to whine about the "meaningless" business buzzwords, the fact is that in many cases they're really not meaningless... it's just that the person doing the complaining doesn't know what they mean, but is too arrogant to admit their own ignorance. I fully understand this perspective, because I was one of the complainers, many years ago. After 30 years in the industry, though, I do understand the "buzzwords", and while they certainly c
Most don't even know the game they are playing. (Score:2)
This is news? (Score:2)
C'mon folks. Anyone who's worked in any field has encountered jargon before. People have complained about corporate jargon since I was a wee lad. Since I'm a wee lad no longer, I complain about the slang of the kids these days ("I'm going to Insta that"). And don't forget, verbing weirds language.
Have a bit of grace. Most people are not trying to obfuscate. We pick up new terms because it's fun, because it reinforces group identity, and perhaps creates an efficient, common language. Sometimes it's annoying
It is in part mimicking (Score:2)
A part of the pseudo-jargon seems to me to be some defensive measure to appear more sophisticated than one really is. Many corporate drones are not very intellectual. Not necessarily complete idiots but people who had to go through some degree with allegedly marketable skills to avoid flipping burgers for a living while not having the motivation to do something meaningful.
So they feel they have to sound smart not to feel second class citizens among the more sophisticated people.
My place is nerdy and i am gl
Not a New Observation (Score:2)
Companies (and academia) having their own language has been known for decades.
Your role in a society or organization, and what they consider important also control how you speak.
During the 1970's and 1980's, Richard Mitchell published a series of newsletters known as The Underground Grammarian [sourcetext.com] about abuse of the English language.
The opening to his book Less Than Words Can Say [sourcetext.com] describes how a professor's language became more verbose and indirect the higher they were promoted within the organization. Another
I am part of the problem (Score:2)
Corporate Speak (Score:2)
Corporate language is a synergistic melding of concrete ambiguity to promote a sense of knowledgeable awareness of the company's DNA by offering a verbose brevity that sequences deliverables into a cohesive bonding of action items. Most people in the corporate world are passionate about the meeting of minds corporate language brings to participants seeking to find excellence in the organization's departmental goals of communicating with all employees on an equal playing field.
Innovation, knowledge and p
Alternative Theory...they're bored, not dumb (Score:2)
American Urban Black Slang is a very obvious version of an ever-mutating communication style that often says nothing new, but can say it in a funny way. I don't ha
Re:Rundown (Score:5, Interesting)
Rundown = The Skinny, the 411, the deets, the dirt.
I highly suggest "A Dictionary of Bullshit." It's old, and UK English, but still very relevant, informative, and above all funny... in the "god, are businesspeeps really this awful?" funny way.
Tesla (Score:2)
Is this going on at Tesla?
I have no idea if their battery pack design is better than what the Second Movers are ginning up, but as to those windows without door frames, Dad's 1969 Plymouth Fury had that arrangement. I think a car like that was once called a "hard top", and it was awful.
First-move . . . this! I am holding off purchase of an electric car until I can get one that isn't built like that piece-of-junk Plymouth.
Re: (Score:3)
Scott Adams, who writes the Dilbert comic strip, says that no matter how absurd a story line he spins someone will inevitably write in to ask if he had been communicating with people in their work place.
Re:brain damage? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not just corporate drones. A couple hundred years of protestant work ethic have left us all terrified to not be working our butts off. Since the world doesn't actually need us to work that hard anymore, we've had to make up a bunch of jobs. Almost all of us are required to engage in fantasy to avoid the cognitive dissonance between our awareness a good portion of our work is total bullshit, and our conviction that our work defines our worth.
Re: (Score:2)
But with all the nature vs. nurture battle still raging on, science does not even know of a "hypothesis" that would really attribute the concept of "personality" to "nature".
(Taking another sip of Mosel as I speak.)
LOL'ed. (Score:2)
Now that's a brutha with the proper attitude.
We're sipping on a very nice Austrian Gruner Veltliner this evening.
Re: (Score:3)
The US Supreme Court disagrees: see 'Citizens United' decision.