Wednesday, August 13, 2008

In the future you wont say "Going Forward"

Jargon is annoying to we who pride ourselves on our excellent skills as writers and speakers. To everyone else the response is "Jargon? It's all good".

"For nearly a decade I wrote a fictional column in the Financial Times about a senior manager who spoke almost entirely in business cliches. Martin Lukes talked the talk. Or rather, he added value by reaching out and sharing his blue sky thinking. At the end of the day he stepped up to the plate and delivered world class jargon that really pushed the envelope. After eight years of being him I came to accept the nouns pretending to be verbs. To task and to impact. Even the new verb to architect I almost took in my stride. I didn't even really mind the impenetrable sentences full of leveraging value and paradigm shifts. But what still rankled after so long were the little things: that he said myself instead of me and that he would never talk about a problem, when he could dialogue around an issue instead."
taken from Are You Going Forward?Then Stop Now by Lucy Kellaway
No it's not "all good". It lets one sound like they are thinking when really they are avoiding it.

1 comment:

Scott in Montreal said...

Jargon is merely a nicer term for bullshitting

 
"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."
-E.M. Forster