Can it possibly be more than two years since I last took on the issue of the subset of business blather that we know as buzzword bingo?
Marlys Harris of Money Watch has stepped in to update us. (Came to me via the Soapbox maven.) A couple of thoughts on her list:
In addition to “human capital” I’ve also recently seen “talent management” to refer to HR. I suppose, like giving employees thank-you notes instead of pay raises, describing them as capital or talent is supposed to disguise the fact that they’re still treated like chattel.
Akin to “transparent” is “visibility”. You can’t be aware of something going on, you have to have visibility of it. Must be the noun—it can’t be visible to you, you must have visibility of it.
One monstrosity that pervaded the organization I recently fled was “learnings”. Evidently the legitimate “lessons” is insufficient, so they had to turn the gerund into a bastardized plural form to describe the aftermath of failed projects.
“Take-away” was big, too. I lost interest when I realized they weren’t talking about Chinese food.
And one of my bêtes-noires (mentioned in my earlier post) is still “socialize”, meaning to make others aware of something. There was a lot of that sort of socializing going on. And “circling back”; not to mention circling wagons.
What would you add to the list?
3 comments:
"Reach out" as in "I reached out to him" instead of "I asked him, consulted him, telephoned him, whatever."
"He leveraged his {noun] to [achieve an objective]." "He leveraged his knowledge of Spanish to make sure the workers were satisfied." Or even "He leveraged his contacts in the government to develop a new policy." "Used" is the most obvious substitute, but there are lots of concrete verbs that actually tell you what was done.
Usually when I use "reach out" I'm appending "to strangle him/her".
The word that always annoyed me at my last workplace was 'Emergent' instead of 'Emergency'. I don't think it's a valid synonym. It is correctly used when referring to growing overseas economies.
'Take ownership' has also replaced 'take responsibility'.
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