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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.

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.

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.

A hopper full of bull

As any fan of the Coen brothers can tell you a hopper is somewhere to dispose of troublesome bodies -admittedly not the most efficient or tidiest method. So imagine my surprise when a friend of mine referred to a mutual colleague as having "lots of proposals in the hopper". Naturally I assumed they were dead. Well you would wouldn't you? Apparently not as the following instant message chat shows:

Suited sort: "He seems to have lots of proposals in the hopper."

Clueless journalist: "The hopper?"

Buzzword bingo

Heard this morning (8 jan 08) on Radio 4: "upskilling". 'Nuff said? Or should they be told to please stop pushing the envelope blue sky-ward on the lex-graph re-engineering front?

PS. Was I still dreaming or did someone utter "customer facing" on the same programme?

Buzzwords and bingo - no.7

This happened to me in a meeting recently. I have to tell somebody.

I asked for the following:

"Within reason and where there is a clear case for doing so - we should be able to make changes in the build phase"

And this is what the project manager put in the final document:

"Following sign-off of this document, the Requirements will be baselined and subject to change control procedures. Small changes to these requirements which emerge during the development phase will be addressed collaboratively with the Business sponsors through a process of reprioritisation. This approach will protect delivery deadlines"

Why use two lines when you can use six? Is it me?

Buzzwords and bingo - no.6

Leadagement

"The basic principles of MANAGEMENT and those of LEADERSHIP practices are easily reducible to CONCEPTS that can become synthesised in the wholistic system of LEADAGEMENT, which hopefully indue course give us LEADAGERS: the dynamic Leader-Managers or Manager-Leaders of tomorrow," says BISIKAY director of the Global LEADAGEMENT Institute in London. (The capitals are all his, not mine)

Bisikay's comment is one of many, many, many comments on management guru Gary Hamel's recent blog entitled "What is management's moonshot?" by which he means "How would you reinvent management?"

Buzzwords and bingo - no. 5

"Repurpose", indeed, is the buzzword du jour. But this piece of linguistic nonsense straight from the parallel universe that is adland goes one better. "We proudly present the first treatment of our new creative." Roughly translated I think this means "we've come up with some new marketing guff and we are just about to foist it on the world."

It is not to be confused with: "This is the new treatment of our first creative," which means either "we've reheated some old-but-moderately-successful marketing guff, but will bill you as if it is completely fresh," or "we know we are about to lose your account but we thought for appearance's sake we'd do as you said and re-think the horse-manure campaign presented last week."

Buzzwords and bingo - no. 4

Repurpose
As in "we will repurpose last week's pitch for tomorrow's meeting".
Why not be honest?  "We don't have time to do any new work so we're going to cut and paste stuff from the last report we did. We'll do a new introduction and maybe even add a couple more slides, assuming we can find someone here who knows how to do things in PowerPoint."

Gospel according to Lukes...

...Martin Lukes, that is, of the FT. Please tell me that "care-frontational" (as opposed to confrontational) is a delicious invention of Lukes' alter ego Lucy Kellaway. It is 50p in the swear box for any of these as well..."buy-in", "this storied company", "facilitate", "roapdmap", "talent alignment", "skillsets", "cognizant", and, of course, "going forward."

Read the piece in full, here. And do not be afraid to laugh.

Buzzwords and bingo - no. 3

Communitainment.

A word created from community, communication and entertainment.

According to the report The User Revolution, by analysts PiperJaffray, "Over the next 10 years more than half of internet usage will be communitainment."

What are they talking about? Websites such as MySpace, YouTube and Facebook.

Faffing around on the internet has never sounded so complicated.

Buzzwords and bingo

Oh do keep up. Can we not get ourselves aligned with a fully functioning web 2.0 orientation on the buzzword bingo interface? Whoever heard it called buzzword bingo? I know this is a family blog and there is never any excuse for bad language, but surely we can put BULLS and HIT together and come up with something that aids onwards and upwards navigation through the elevating envelope? Or is the learning curve just too gradient-rich?  Perhaps it time we all engaged with stakeholders on this global project and took a properly-scoped 360-degree view. It is, after all, mission critical that the group-wide impact on all customer-facing awareness bunnies is downwardly managed on a 24 7 basis...

BS ratio: 2.925 (that's total-blither-word-count / buzzwords, by the way...anything under 3 is benchmarkable...)

Gimme that jibba-jabba

Here at Snakes & Ladders we are dynamic, we work hard and play even harder. Every day we swallow frogs, push envelopes and square circles. So adept are we at thinking outside the box that we are truly off our trollies. So if you are on the beach with time to park that thought it might be worth reflecting on what on earth I am talking about.

A while a go Carly wrote an article to help us understand some of the management lingo out there. But this is a fast evolving language and we need your help. So read our buzzword bingo and drop us a line with some of the more unusual phrases and words you've heard, please remember to include a translation. Collectively we will boil the ocean.

Wednesday's word of the day: psychographics

Are your meetings beginning to make a bit much sense? Try throwing the word "psychographics" around a bit. According to this month's strategy+management magazine, it is "the study of personality, values, attitudes, interests and lifestyles". Demographics as run by the marketing department, in other words.

A Psycho graphic

(Pic by Illest Waffle)

Mentors and mentees

In the business world, a mentor is usually an experienced businessperson who offers support and guidance to another, more junior person as he or she travels up the career path. Simple. Well, potentially complicated and quite a lot of work as well as being useful, which is why we're running a series about it, but the definition itself is relatively straightforward.

Getting a job is not like making chocolate cake

I was having what seemed like a perfectly normal conversation with a manager when he calmly told me that a particular aspect of recruitment "was not a vanilla process". I did what most people do when they don't have a clue what someone's talking about: made vague sounds of agreement and hit Google the moment I hung up the phone.

My first couple of searches threw up pages of links to techniques for curing vanilla pods and recipes for old-fashioned chocolate cake, but eventually I hit the management mother lode and discovered that using a vanilla process makes work more like riding a bike than managing a project. So, as far as I can tell, this means that recruitment is not like riding a bike and that job-seekers should therefore avoid turning up to interviews wearing padded lycra shorts.

This man is probably not on his way to a job interview

(Pic from chriswalsh_35)