Snakes and Ladders - Times Online - WBLG

It's not called offshoring any more

Want to outsource or offshore part of your business but don't want to take things too far? It's time to consider "nearshoring", which is just like offshoring but without the confusing time zone differences.

Or, to put it less jargonistically, hiring someone in Eastern Europe rather than India.

Worth 50 points (at least)

Picture the scene: two men in grey suits are talking earnestly. Each is trying to impress upon the other that they know the most about the business of business. "We must increase our margins," says one. "We must drive profit share," the other agrees, nodding hard.

But suit A cannot leave it there: "We must deepen wallet share," he says triumphantly.

Yes boys, well done. Can you imagine a woman coming out with such twaddle? "Purse share" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Total Quality Buzzword Management

Double buzzword points for me please. Lord Woolf, refering to his work on the BAE corruption allegations, said: "We have given it a road map to reach the gold standard." He actually did. Honest. I heard him on the radio. "Road map" and "gold standard" must have value individually in this game. But together? That is C-suite total quality buzzword excellence. Hurrah.

Do you speak Nerdic?

Nerdic is now the fastest growing language in Europe, according to research by Pixmania. That's Nerdic,  as in geek-speak, rather than anything to do with Scandinavia.

Nerdic is adding 100 new words a year to the lexicon. As one commentator says: "It's incredible that I can describe an N96 with HSDPA, Wi-Fi with a 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss and GPS and be understood across Europe."

Understood across Europe? Who's he kidding.

So here are the top 10 Nerdic words and phrases to look out for, with definitions - just in case you find yourself trapped in Nerdia without a dictionary. (Note acroynms should be used where ever possible).

BAA BA black sheep: Heathrow T5 went wrong because it believed its own "buzzwords"

Alistair Cooke is a hard act to follow. But Clive James fills his "Letter from America" slot on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday mornings brilliantly. He was in spectacular form on 6 April delivering this demolition of Heathrow Terminal Five, BAA and BA. (This is a text version).

Veronica Kumar, the 29-year-old 'head of people and change' at T5, was the target of James' ridicule, although he was kind enough not to name her. "Our policy has been to create the context for change, then apply changes within that context," she said in what maybe the apotheosis of Buzzword Bingo. Said James of Kumar's management-speak: "Since that could mean anything it probably means something."

James' great talent is for taking the mick, as anyone who saw any of his Clive James on TV series can testify. But he is more than a gagmeister. On this occasion, as with many others, he leads his audience to appreciate the real damage that can be done by waffle. The problems of Heathrow, surely, came about because managers had their feet no where near the ground. Being airborne in this way, even when running airports, is dangerous.

Lots has been said of the saga (Jamie Doward's scrutiny in The Observer of a couple of weeks ago was better than most) but the key mistake was arrogance. Even if BA and BAA were 100 per cent confident that everything would work smoothly, they should have opened in stages. By going for the big bang, they were asking for trouble. And that trouble is not going away: as I write flights are still being cancelled and T5 has to deny an allegation that nine out of ten missing bags are permanently lost. This must be nonsense. But Heathrow's biggest problem is that it is all too believable.

James described the guff quite kindly, as "high flown abstract poetry." Players of Buzzword Bingo will win big with "context for change" if they ever hear it again. Organisations that even think in such farcical terms are losers.

Regional buzzword bingo

A survey published today by TipTopJob.com suggests that different buzzwords wind people up differently depending on where they work in the UK.

In Wales, workers have voted "touch base" the most annoying piece of management jargon; in Scotland, it is "at the end of the day"; while in London, "play it by ear" gets our goat and our vote.

Whether this a true reflection of the annoyance of certain terms or whether these words are used more frequently, and therefore, are more likely to be more annoying in these areas, I'm not sure. But here is the full run down of what annoys people most:

Wales

1. Touch base

2. Believe you and me

3. Play it by ear.

Scotland

1. At the end of the day

2. There is no I in team

3. Play it by ear

When consultants attack

Overheard: a group of consultants discussing an absent peer's ability. Their conclusion? He's nothing but an empty suit. What a great put down.

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 . . .

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.

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.