Please Scuba In Your Own Think Tank

Gap analysis ... customer offer vision ... paradigm shifts ... thought leadership ... Today a meeting isn’t a meeting without a thick sludge of corporate jargon to separate the high flyers from the rest of us. Love them or loathe them (and most of us do) we can’t escape the growing avalanche of bizarre words and phrases entering the workplace.

Like many people I’ve had a number of careers and found myself the innocent target, and even the occasional purveyor, of management-speak. In book publishing, as it moved from gentlemanly to cutthroat, I sat in meetings where we talked of “vertical integration” and “brandwidth” without batting an eyelid. In further education everyone seemed to be pursuing an elusive “quality.” And, as a local authority manager, I was forever trying to work out who my “stakeholders” were.

For maximum effect, as every successful corporate bullshitter knows, the most effective jargon is abstract, latinate, and comes from the US. Acronyms are excellent for full impenetrability (try Swot, MMM and KVI for starters) while an arbitrary capital letter may even suggest divine origins.

Work has become the new religion and needs its magic phrases for the priesthood to bamboozle us. Ideally, these will be from a lexicon invented by the new faith’s gurus, mainly elderly right-wing Americans who seem to know the Way Ahead. Hence, most of us spend every working hour “pursuing excellence,” “making a difference” or ensuring some “continuous improvement,” while feeling that we must be missing something, given how meaningless these mantras are.

Another tier of jargon seems to emanate from US manager jocks who either borrow their sayings from sports or toilet stalls. Since the 1980s they’ve been making sure we “cover all our bases,” “punch above our weight” and appreciate the need for a “level playing field,” while also advising us not to “piss outside our circle.”

But why do we use so much jargon and should all perpetrators be taken out of the meeting room and quietly shot? Not quite. The next time you sit fuming next to someone who says “win-win situation” 15 times in a credit control catchup, try reflecting on the reasons why we end up speaking in corporate tongues.

One-upmanship must come pretty high up the list — nearly all of us have used the latest piece of jargon to impress a superior or interviewer. But this pales into insignificance beside the seasoned operator who uses constant corporate-speak and lets you know when an existing term has been superseded — “core competencies” are just so 2005. They know that using old jargon is professional suicide.

Equally, getting it right means joining an exclusive club that can help your career. Perhaps this is the real reason why more of us are finding romance with our colleagues (with the boss’s permission of course). Nobody outside our office has a clue what we’re actually talking about.

And then there are times when we use jargon because we can’t remember what we said before it existed. Just what is a “portfolio of skills”? It might only mean making all those unsuccessful career starts sound sexy on your resume, but sometimes it’s easier to go with the flow and just get on with the important business of not being “empowered” (taking on so many extra duties we don’t have time to notice our salary hasn’t gone up).

Some of the jargon tripping you up? You’re not alone. But unfortunately, nobody is prepared to break ranks and admit it. And so, you find yourself locked into using jargon because it would be too embarrassing to ask what zero-sum negotiations really means at this stage. If everyone else in the meeting is talking about being “in the loop” you’re hardly going to interrupt and say: “Hey, I think you mean those who use the same impenetrable jargon, and see themselves as cutting-edge.” We just let our managers carry on speaking to each other in advanced Klingon and hope they don’t notice us doodling.This may possibly leave you, the jargon intolerant person, in a state of some fear and loathing. In which case you may just need to develop a better sense of humor.

Hearing others earnestly talking about “the big picture” and “proactive, not reactive” should ideally lead to a serious fit of the giggles. You could even invent your own jargon and watch the MBAers making straight for their BlackBerries.

Alternatively, you could work in an environment where corporate jargon has yet to spoil the working day. Sand sweeping in Timbuktu anyone?

Don't wake me up, I'm in a meeting ...

What is it about meetings that always brings out the worst in people? If we’re passive, we find they last longer than Murder She Wrote on UK Gold. If we’re dominant with bad listening skills, then it’s just another ego trip with a captive audience sharing one Wagon Wheel between them.

The problem is made worse because most of us think that all meetings are the same. We go in ridiculously unprepared with no idea whether to go into a slight doze or a deep coma. If nothing else, below should give you some ideas to sleep on - preferably in a meeing.

(1) The ‘I’ve been here so long it seems like a second home to me except I don’t normally go for late 80s office furniture’ meeting

A weak chairperson and a few individuals who’ve seen Michael Douglas in Wall Street and can’t wait for red braces to come back are all that’s needed here. Everyone talks at cross-purposes and listening to others is kept to a minimum - just as well considering the number of people in the early stages of rapid eye movement.

Giveaway Phrases:‘Now we’re all here, there’s something else I’d like to say.’‘I think we’re going to need another urgent meeting.’

(2) The ‘let’s get the boring bit out of the way so that we can get down to a tea party’ meeting

In theory this should be one your favourites, especially if a gleaming trolley is temptingly parked in front of everybody with full tea service and lots of comestibles. Unfortunately if you happen to be a woman, there’s every chance that you’ll have to be ‘mother’. Centuries of conditioning mean that male drive flags at the first sign of a steaming pot and fails completely at the merest hint of passing around napkins. Total paralysis sets in with pouring - which is regarded as the next best thing to cross-dressing in front of colleagues.

Giveaway Phrases: ‘So who’s going to be mother?’‘What you need is a good J-Cloth.’

(3) The ‘people I love you all. I want to empower you so that I can delegate all the boring responsibilities on to you’ meeting

Empowerment is a popular buzz word and what an ideal opportunity to thrust the fruits of lazy corporate thinking (sic) into your innocent lap. Basically your facilitator - it sounds friendlier than incompetent manager - will attempt to offload even more dull tasks on to yours truly under the guise that this is somehow liberating your spirit.

Giveaway Phrases: ‘Think of me as your facilitator and friend, not your boss.’‘It’s the only way ahead …’

(4) The ‘if 20 staff go on assertiveness training courses, what do you expect?’ meeting

Assertiveness is a vital skill in today’s business world but few of us can have foreseen what happens when a group of its expert practitioners are forced to make a collective decision in a meeting. As twenty people decide what they want, state it openly, listen carefully and get in touch with their individual needs as the new departmental milk rota is discussed, all you can do is keep quiet and hope no one asks for your opinion.

Giveaway Phrases: ‘No.’‘I think yours is a brilliant idea, but I don’t agree with it.’

(5) The ‘I think this shows what conscientious employees we are by not rushing home’ evening meeting

No one will wish to attend this unless they have been given a mobile phone for partners to continually ring in and ask when they’ll be home. The meeting then has to be temporarily abandoned each time as people mouth to each other that ‘it’s in the dog’ and think they’re being screamingly original.

Giveaway Phrases: ‘There doesn’t seem much point in going home.’‘Can I have half your Polo?’