The Corporate Bullshit Detector: J - K

Japanese-style management - The collapse of the Japanese economy has rather put the mockers on this one. If you've still got a Japanese management system in your company, start considering hari-kari.

Job-depth - Check the size of your job description. If it only runs to a single page, then think 'flexible work force.'

Job share - Both of you should be extremely grateful that your company is willing to let you do what is virtually a full-time job each for just half the pay.

Job-specific competencies - Surprisingly, some jobs require you to actually know something - don't worry, in your case Facebook (sex life mapped out for the next five years) or art therapy (exchanging doodles during a meeting) will be quite sufficient.

Joint implementation - Both partners agree to actually do the same thing together at the same time. Don't they make it look like hard work? Sometimes you wonder if you've missed something.

Just in time - Supply-on-demand system for maximum efficiency, which includes periods of inactivity; sort of what you are expected to do all of the time, except without the inactivity.

Key - Players, objectives, actions, visions, outcomes. What is it about this adjective that makes everything very important, self-important or just plain ridiculous? Urgent key guidance needed immediately please.

Knowledge economy - Fewer and fewer of us are making widgets and, instead, are supposed to be exhaustively producing ideas and concepts in the form of symbolic knowledge. Just in case we ever wanted an excuse for an emergency lie-down.

Know where all the bodies are buried? - Oh, dear, should you report this?

The Office Christmas Survival Guide

Office life can be challenging at the best of times, what with the ever-present threat of being 'consolidated' (i.e. sacked), negotiating the minefield of political correctness, and the strain of keeping the boss ignorant of what really goes on from nine-to-five - not to mention the loud girl in accounts whose coarse laughter becomes more grating by the day. But the run-up to Christmas brings its own peculiar hurdles to overcome before the holiday finally arrives.

The Christmas Lunch
The atmosphere varies from convivial to decline and fall of the Roman Empire, as everyone eventually gives up trying to look dignified in a paper hat and plastic moustache. But it's the one time of year when you and your colleagues can be sure of working towards a common goal, i.e. getting sufficiently drunk not to care about the loss of decorum.

How to survive: Accept the inevitable by adopting the sense of humour and table manners of a four-year-old. This is no time to play party pooper and rush back to the office in a fit of moral indignation to 'get on with some work'.

The Christmas Party
Previous parties will have left you wondering if (a) a drunken clinch that lasts 20 seconds can form the basis of a sexual harrassment claim, (b) the pokey room with all the broken PCs is used at any other time of the year, and (c) direct eye contact will ever be resumed again in your department.

How to survive: Behave as if your mother’s watching you. Better the terminal boredom of your colleagues’ small talk about how busy Boots is than discovering your drunken photocopier activities have become the number one screen saver across a large part of the developed world.

Christmas Cards
Should you only give them to people who gave them to you last year (assuming you can remember)? Should you leave them on people's desks, or send them to their home addresses? What can you do if half-a-dozen cards land on you desk on Christmas Eve, when it's too late to go out and buy any to return? (This assumes a level of popularity unusual in offices, unless you are the boss.)

How to survive: E-mail everyone with a seasonal greeting saying that you aren't sending cards this year as you don’t want to add to global warming.

The Chairman's Visit
It's difficult to know which side feels more awkward when the boss pops in for his annual minimal-contact staff-bonding exercise to thank you for all for your hard work, and explain why his bonus sack is empty this year (again).

How to survive: Pray that it takes place before the Christmas lunch (see above). The last thing you want is to greet your leader wearing a set of flashing reindeer antlers on your head - it will only mark you out for the next redundancy round.

Office Decorations
Happily, one person knows where the office decorations are kept. Sadly, they haven't been updated since 1974, so are now both extremely tatty and a fire hazard.

How to survive: In their current state, the decorations are literally a matter of life and death, and only the terminally disaffected would actually want to see their office go up in smoke. Time for someone to raid petty cash for some new twinkling lights. And don't worry about how naff they look; remember that the office at Christmas is a taste-free zone, and must always be so.

Secret Santa
In theory a cute idea. Everyone is given a spending limit to buy a 'secret' present for another member of staff, who never discovers the identity of the giver. In practice, it sustains the entire market in fur-trimmed, purple knickers and dubiously-shaped sex toys.

How to survive: Smile bravely and conveniently 'forget' the offending gift on the bus back home. Do not try to drop it in the charity box at the local church.

The Last Day
A forlorn attempt to evoke the Christmas spirit involves standing around on mince pie-encrusted carpet tiles drinking sherry. This, of course, is for the few stragglers who haven't managed to turn what should be two days off work into an unofficial three-week holiday.

How to survive: With any luck, you will be allowed home at lunchtime. Until then, feign interest in everyone else’s Christmas plans, which generally consist of transporting difficult relatives from one front room to an identical front room on the other side of the country. Happy Christmas

That's No Way to Say Good-Bye: The Leaving Party Countdown Cont

1pm Think of the lunchtime drinks as but the rehearsal of what is to come - it's certainly uncanny how a mixture of Tikka curry, lager and crisps down your expensive suit appear just like vomit! Expect to see all of your colleagues and maybe some you've never seen in your life before. They're not stupid. They know that you're paying.

4pm It's sad, but still no-one will admit to a leaving party. You leave it to your own extraordinary powers of deduction as a 1970s' disco unit appears from nowhere and prophylactic balloons (rhubarb crumble) are stuck on the walls. You spot a Robert Dyas bag being furtively passed around your department. Have they bought you a mop head?

5pm Inevitably, that moment you've been dreading since your first dental appointment looms. 'Party! Party!' screams a committee memeber, letting off the six party poppers your collection warranted. You do your best to look surprised and get ready for the revenge of the imprisoned upon the free. Soon everyone in the company has boogied-on down. After-all, who wouldn't want to be included in this marvellous opportunity to stop working and witness your long, drawn-out embarrassment?

Then the Tarzanogram arrives, in your case early, because he's got more lucrative work ahead of him and is already looking at his watch non-surreptitiously. If you're a man you'll ideally do your best to lose consciousness immediately; if you're a woman you'll try to be post-feminist and say that you're glad men are now allowed to humiliate themselves in public and now they know how women feel. But, in the event, you'll probably just scream, have a silly look on your face and get baby oil all over his fun fur.

Now's the cue for your director to say how much you'll be missed, make you feel guilty for spoiling his holiday planner and give your the card and present. It's important to look surprised and shocked, as if all you ever expected to receive was your P.45.

You tell them what a wonderful workplace it's been (that's why you're leaving), what a super surprise all this is (you always wear your best clothes to work), how amusing all the messages in the card are (ranging from the vulgar to the obscene) and what a lot of friends you have made (most of those here are freeloaders). Hold up your Best of Joan Collins Gift Set (yes, chosen by the Poundstretcher shopper) and find yourself lost for words.

Break down. This will come quite naturally.

The Corporate Bullshit Detector: H - I

H

Homeworking - Very holistic, but have you lost your work status and pension plan just to be on first-name terms with the local Bettaware representative?

Hot desking - Used by those who are too important to be in the office very often - or so unimportant that it doesn't really matter. You know who you are.

I

Increments - The minimalist office seems to have encouraged minimalist salary increases. Ask for a magnifying glass so that you can see yours more clearly.

In the loop - Those who use the same impenetrable jargon, and see themselves as cutting-edge and belonging to a secret society of true believers. And/ or would have been burnt at the stake in times past.

Investors in People - Lots of silver plaques explaining that your employer is as caring as it can get without actually treating you to an Aveda body spa weekend or paying you more.

ISO 9000 - If you are not involved with this benchmarking system, you'll have no idea what it is. Even if you are, you'll probably have the same problem.

That's No Way to Say Good-Bye: The Leaving Party Countdown Part 1

You've had the job offer that's too good to be true. And, let's be honest, no-one goes through psychometric testing and expensive interview outfits just for fun. Or do they? Because, wait a minute, you're beginning to have second thoughts. Be honest - you just can't face the horrors of the last day and the dreaded Office Leaving Party. In order to survive, we need to know exactly what to expect - and how to behave - with the most thought-out strategy since the D- Day invasions. This guide is for anyone who finds it difficult to break down when presented with a Spiderman bubble-bath holder.

9am A doleful demeanour is essential on your last day. Not that this should be difficult knowing what you've got to face. Winsomely smirking members of the 'Party! Party!' committee (no one knows the number of plastic beakers and boxes of Kettle Chips you're supposed not to have seen) pretend to have an earnest conversation about paper clips. But the phrases 'edible thong' and 'front seat' percolate in your direction. Mentally re-adjust your alcohol consumption by a factor of ten when you hear their plans for you and the baby oil.

10am Your desk might look like a safety-zone but you soon discover how wrong you are. Colleagues like to prefigure every conversation with comments, veiled and indirect, about your departure, as if there still might be time to warn you of the perils of eating in a different Pret a Manger. You should think of all those illegal dental appointments and try to look guilty. Last-day diplomacy dictates that you should walk around the office blindfolded. Don't be surprised to see at least half the staff in the lavatory signing your three-foot-high day-glo padded card. For your sanity's sake deliberately fail to notice PAs trying to hide bulding envelopes in their bags.

11am It's important to make time to give your replacement an idea of the duties they can expect. Whether you wish to itemise your boss's predilection for giant tubs of Vaseline or the colleague whose breath always smells like the inside of an acquarium is up to you. Spider plant envy creeps in: if only you could be a half-dead plant of indeterminate age, there would be no need for any of this.

12 noon You accidentally hear about mysterious shooping expeditions to Lidls and grow sad: does your revered personal style really count for nothing? Is this all you mean to them? Disappointingly, no sign even of a Marks & Spencer bag, so you won't even be able to take anything back. Who cares if a colleague obsessed with Poundstretcher specials seems to be having the final say in what is purchased. Breathe deeply ...

The Corporate Bullshit Detector: G

Game plan - Everybody is supposed to have one for the next five years with in-built career reviews and life-training. Or else just needs to remember to buy more lottery tickets.

Gap in the market - Sinclair C5 car, Tom Jones doing hip-hop, retro pussy-bow blouses. Tell your boss that some gaps in the market are meant to be.

Grass roots - The depressing people who buy your products or services. Every head office insists it's in touch with theirs, and someone once remembers running a focus group in Chelmsford.

Group culture - Sharing the same aims and objectives - chiefly going home occasionally if at all possible

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?