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Buzzwords and bingo no.12

In the last 48 hours, I have heard the expression "elephant in the room" used by four individuals in four different meetings. I've nothing in particular against this term - but it's getting a little clichéd. Here are some of my alternative suggestions:

There's a Mills in the room - only appropriate when there's a McCartney in the meeting.

There's a Hague in the room - despite overwhelming evidence that he was going to lose the General election in 2001, William Hague genuinely thought he was going to win.

There's a Keegan in the room - Kevin Keegan was hailed as the new Messiah just a couple of months back when he became manager at Newcastle for the second time. You'd have thought the fans would have realised by now.

The Coldplay in the room - yes, they're popular - but they're also pants . . . you poor misguided fools . . .

Eyeball alerts

Being on call 24 hours a day could soon become easier if a little bit too immediate. Researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle, are developing a contact lens containing metal circuitry and light-emitting diodes that communicates with mobile devices.

Forget casually glancing down at your Blackberry to see if you have a new e-mail message or an incoming call, the new lens will literally project images in front of your eyes. All this portable high-tech wizardry will either make you feel hugely in-demand and on Her Majesty's Secret Service or like a hunted animal, depending on how much you enjoy being plugged into the corporate machine.   

The lenses are now being tested on rabbits according to BusinessWeek (March 3)  - which raises more questions than it answers - but not for lack of human volunteers. "What surprised us are the dozens of people calling to volunteer to test them," Babak Parviz, the lead researcher, says. 

The US government is backing the project that could have military applications such as directing soldiers' movements via GPS units.

Credit: This image of the least suitable candidate for contact lenses comes from Island Med Student 

City of London pay rises all round. Yippeee.

It seems that my recent post about pay rises going out of fashion told only part of the story. Phew. And as for a meltdown in the markets...

Big thanks to The Joslin Rowe Financial Services Employment Index. It tells of the "most up-to-date trends in the jobs market," according to, er, Joslin Rowe, the recruitment agency. I know it is the job of headhunters like JR to try to cheer us all up, and to tell us all that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. But hey, it is still nice to hear good news.

It's latest research tells us three things about job prospects in the good old City of London. First, it is took an average of 72 days to fill a City job in January compared to 87 days in the same month in 2007. Second, there were 20 per cent fewer people looking for City jobs in January this year (at 30,000) than in October last year. But best of all, City salaries are up, yes UP, by 10 per cent over the 12 months. And while the big swinging Richards of investment banking have found some way of keeping their bonus pools brimming despite the global credit crunch, it appears that the people that actually do the hard work are benefiting too.

Average salaries in London have risen 11 per cent to £38,759. Hourly rates for temporary workers in the City have increased from £15.22 to £16.49 in the last year, a 8.4 per cent increase. Or so Joslin Rowe would have us believe.

Leveraging laughs

Is your boss a "humour initiator"? That's the question posed by a new book - The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up by Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher (John Wiley & Sons, £12.99) - that recently landed on my desk and performed a little tap dance. The modern leader, its writers argue, should be able to wisecrack their way through difficult situations to give those around them a boost. Some companies seem to riding at the front of the japes 'n' giggles bandwagon already, but I wondered whether their employees are really rolling in the aisles or contemplating a swift exit. Among the culprits are...

Buzzwords and bingo no.11

A press release from an IT company landed in my inbox with the following passage

The NVIDIA APX 2500 applications processor, which is the culmination of 800 man years of engineering . . .

What does this mean? That one person has been working since the middle ages to get this bit of kit to work? Has it taken this long because they are inefficient? To put it into context, I've worked out that it takes about two man years to produce a single copy of The Times newspaper. It's hardly the sort of thing you would want to plaster on the side of the trucks that get the papers out onto the streets.

Sometimes, these kinds of terms are useful on the factory floor. Let's leave them there.

Please don't be my Valentine

What could be worse than falling madly in love with the oddly hairy guy in accounts who Carly kindly introduced in advice about office romances? Even the vague possibility that the bunch of drooping red roses and unsigned card that plays "Wild Thing" (Hallmark's bestseller, or so I read in Fast Company this month) is from said Hirsute in accounts. Perhaps he's watching you over the top of his computer screen, right now?

Oh, the horror of unsolicited attention at work. Struggling home on the bus with a vast bouquet is exhausting but dropping the unwanted gift into the nearest bin seems such a waste. What about all the air miles that your flowers have racked up?

But not everyone shares my run-a-mile-and-keep-on-running attitude to Valentine's Day. In some companies, my friends tell me, it's celebrated as just another part of the "who's for table-football as we brainstorm?" culture of office life. But what if you don't want to play? 

A pay rise? Don't be so old fashioned

Is there any room for the paternalism in corporate life? There was a time when employers sought out opportunities to help workers with the nuts-and-bolts welfare stuff that most people take for granted. Employers had to, partly, because Government legislation obliged them to comply with safety, health, and personal financial issues. Trade unions also pressed boards to do the decent thing. Considerate employers may have believed that good corporate behaviour would stimulate productivity and encourage loyalty. It would be nice to think that companies took care of employees because it was the simply the right thing to do.

The 11th e-mail gaffe

Following on from Sathnam's post on the top 10 e-mail gaffes here is another. This will make anyone who works in law or any other sensitive role cringe and journalists the world over smirk.

Network World reports: "A simple e-mail slip-up, the kind any one of us could make at any time: A Philadelphia lawyer addresses his electronic missive to an Alex Berenson instead of Bradford Berenson.

But what happens next is anything but routine; it's front-page news in the New York Times. That's because Alex Berenson happens to be a reporter for the New York Times, as opposed to Bradford being another lawyer, and the e-mail happens to concern settlement talks between the U.S. government and pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly that include the proposed sum of $1 billion. Oopsie."

Oopsie indeed.

What a tweet

Twitter, the microblogging service which allows you to send pithy messages to tell friends what you are having for dinner or that you're picking your nose or something equally memorable, is being used by the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's camp to alert his supporters to rallies.

That Obama should be an early adopter is not perhaps unexpected. He's no fool nor apparently a twit because the verb for broadcasting such messages via Twitter is not twittering but "tweeting" according to The Economist (Feb 2). How sweet.

KFC

The subject of business names is endlessly fascinating, but as a resident of south London I've developed a particular predilection for monitoring the many ways in which the capital's fried chicken outlets try to rip off the KFC brand. In some cases it simply involves propietors replacing "Kentucky" with the name of another US state: as in Dallas Fried Chicken, Tennessee Fried Chicken, Texan Fried Chicken and Carolina Fried Chicken. Then there are more creative owners who replace "Kentucky" with another noun or adjective: examples including everything from Perfect Fried Chicken, to New Perfect Fried Chicken, American Fried Chicken, Local Fried Chicken, Western Fried Chicken, Star Fried Chicken, USA Fried Chicken, Capital Fried Chicken and Southern Fried Chicken.

But on a trip to the West Midlands this week I fell upon the most outrageous example I've ever come across: Kent's Tuck Inn Fried Chicken. Say it quickly. Unfortunately, the establishment was closed, so I couldn't establish whether the food was as finger lickin' good as the name.

Governmentium

This is a copy of an e-mail which is doing the rounds. It was sent to us by Nigel Walsh, deputy editor of Career. It is sure to resonate with anyone who has worked in government or a bureaucratic corporation. 

"Research in South Africa has led to the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science.

The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons...

Proof that consultants have a sense of humour - and that it involves graphs

My colleague Emily Ford kindly forwarded me a consultancy's report that came with this covering e-mail:

Dear consultants:

Please benchmark attached analysis against respective efforts from your consultancies. Some very insightful thoughts and views contained.

(name removed to protect the professional people in suits)

The PDF attached to the e-mail is called Consultants and Relationships. At first glance, it could be taken seriously. There are colourful graphs, neat use of multiple typefaces and the logo of an extremely well-known firm on each page. Look a little closer, however, and it becomes apparent that there are actual jokes on each page. They aren't enormously funny, but they do get points for trying.

Famous Fiddlers (of expenses)

Derek Conway surely deserves a top ten place for the breathtaking way he employed his high living student son as parliamentary researcher. But who else makes the SCAM (that's the Scandalous and/or Corrupt Adminstrative Misrepresentations) Top Ten? 

My top three? Straight in a number one is Dennis Kozlowski of the US engineering firm Tyco. It takes great skill to spend $6,000 on a shower curtain. Expense claims forms feature some of the finest stories ever penned by journalists: but let Conrad Black, former proprietor of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph stand as the hero of their art. There is no other place to hold a birthday party for one's wife than Bora Bora in the South Pacific. And I am going to nominate Emporer Nero too. Or was he fidlling with something else as Rome burned?

PS I shall file this under enterprise. Obviously.

Buzzwords and bingo no.10

Have you been caught at it in front of the boss, yet? The act of frantically clicking out of instant messaging and into a multi-coloured spreadsheet as soon as your manager hovers into view has been christened "boss-spasming" according to an e-mail about "must-have office jargon for 2008" that floated to the top of my inbox this morning.

Boss-spasming, which sounds like a medical condition (symptoms: cricked neck and breathlessess) or a desperate bid to get ahead by currying sexual favours, was my favourite. Watch out: the expression "looking busy" could mark you out as yesterday's workslave.   

Other phrases to add to this year's buzzword bingo scorecard include: workspace-specific perceptual abstraction a.k.a. daydreaming; and blamestorming - the act of collective tutting and finger-pointing.  It's all just thought chewing gum on the carpet of office life, really.

Oh dear, I've just coined another term for BS.

How to make money from YouTube

In light of the news that people who upload successful videos on YouTube may share in the revenues generated through advertising by parent company Google - here are some top tips for generating that online blockbuster courtesy of some recent research at Cass Business School.

According to an article on work by Caroline Wiertz and Professor Thorsten Hennig-Thurau (who has the rather intriguing title of Professor of Movie Marketing), there are three elements that distinguish successful posts from those that only just make it into double-figures.