the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

A bit of an old topic here, but it has raised its ugly head with me lately and has sparked this post. As I have said here before I have a deep loathing of its use and if I ever slip into it, it will be simply in the form of parody or sarcasm.

In recent years my working life has kept me away from the sort of circles where management speak is usually found. I work in a niche world where we have our own patois made up of company, and industry sector, jargon, and I’m OK with that. But today, outside of work, I overheard someone talking about handling the first tranche of work with the second tranche due next month. What they meant was that they had the first job in hand and the next lot would be along in a few weeks, so why not say that?

Tranche is French for slice, or portion. It seemed to slip into business life, as an expression, in the Eighties as a general term when it had been in use for a hundred years or so in the financial sector regarding the issuing of bonds. It began to creep into the IT world around the time that I was leaving that discipline, but having slipped over into the world of logistics myself, there it was again.

There seems to be a need for people to try and make themselves sound clever by using alternative terms, and it also has the benefit of clouding understanding of what your are saying so that blame is harder to pin down when things don’t work out.

I have known some expert protagonists whose contributions to meetings have been stunning examples of talking for ten, twenty, thirty minutes or more and saying absolutely nothing of any substance, yet have been lauded as gurus. It is all akin the the Emperor’s New Clothes, in that people see what they want to see.

At one time, it started as a joke for a Christmas team meeting, I used the facility on PowerPoint to put a scrolling text across a slide. I would be stood there pontificating in full corporate lingo when, behind my back, a message would roll over the screen. I might be talking about a new contract and how we had worked hard to win it when my audience would see something like “This fell into his lap when the previous contractor pulled out” and then, over the next slide where I would be using all of the buzz phrases about how we were going to have a superb relationship with the new client, my listeners would see “They’re crap. They don’t pay and are complete bastards to work with which is why the other contractor legged it”

From this I put together a spoof presentation. Using every bit of management speak that I could think of; low hanging fruit, upper quartile, bucketise, get down into the weeds, circle the wagons, high level learnings, think outside the box, tick all the boxes, get on trend and many more. I worked these into something between Gilbert and Sullivan and Flanders and Swann, albeit speaking it rather than singing. Behind me, over a series of corporate information style slides, the banner would be either translating into plain English or saying things like “WTF is that supposed to mean?”. Sadly I can’t find a copy of it now, but I don’t get the opportunities to use it these days.

Taking the piss out of that way of talking was, to use another piece of management speak (MS), career inhibiting at times, but whilst I might have done better, I didn’t do too badly. At least I did what I did on my own terms and could look myself in the mirror.

Is management speak so bad? I love language and, whilst that is why I don’t like MS, could it just be a form of corporate patois that should be left alone? Perhaps it is, but, in my experience, it is too often used to plaster over incompetence. Even in its most benign usage it can render the truth opaque or even invisible. When someone presents to me using MS I don’t think that they are bright or clever, I think “What a plonker”. I think the same about anyone who is impressed by MS.

For a large chunk of my working life I have been, of necessity, a communicator. It has been fundamental to achieving my objectives to be clear about things and leave no room for ambiguity. Along the way one of the things that influenced the way that I speak was when I was working through simultaneous translation. It makes life easier for the translator and audience if what you say is stripped back ti the bare essentials.

Today we seem to have a need to enhance what we say. On a recent discussion about some work for a potential client I said, quite genuinely, that I was excited by the prospect of tackling that project. “But not super excited?” came the disappointed response. The realisation that I had probably blown my chance was balanced by the thought that I would not have to work for someone who talked in cliches, and their next few sentences confirmed that I should walk away. I did.

We have a beautiful language, and there is no need to mangle it.