Outsource Issue 22 - (Page 114)
THE BACK END THE LAST WORD
Busting the Jargon
Sitting through yet another interminable presentation I was beginning to doze off. No lack of effort from the young presenter - but his tall tales on how his company could raise first-time resolution rates to 99.999999% (I may be exaggerating somewhat: I was tired) were just blurring into all the others I’d heard that day. And then as I felt my eyelids drop – it happened. Like being stung by a hornet that dreaded phrase burnt into my suddenlywide-awake brain: “It was like herding cats.” Now I know it’s a metaphor. I know, when you think about it, it represents pretty well what you’re trying to describe. But it doesn’t matter. There’s something about that phrase which drives me nuts. More than nuts. It’s like chewing on metal.
OPINION
And then when he followed up with “nailing jelly to the wall” I was done. Outta there. I stood up in the middle of his finest hour and simply left the seminar room. It was either that or get homicidal. Let me explain: I know our industry is riddled with jargon – but I don’t have to like it. What offends me isn’t so much the jargon itself – sometimes that’s both creative and amusing – but the speed with which it gets adopted and disseminated by 20,000 MBAs straight out of the Numbnuts Business School for the Exceedingly Ordinary who haven’t a creatively amusing bone in their collective bodies. The first person to use the phrase “herding cats” was a genius. The 20,000th person is asking for a short sharp jab to the sternum. Because what this jargon says, 99 times in a hundred, is “I can talk your language: look how smart I am” – as if talking the talk implies being able to walk the walk. People: it does not. I am offended by the proposition that some supercilious punk in a moderately expensive suit believes he can talk my language simply because he’s read three books on business processes and been parachuted in by some impossibly avaricious consultancy (naming no names – anonymity only goes so far, amirite Mr Editor?) to tell me how to do the business I’ve been perfecting for well over a decade. No matter how many buzzwords he rolls out he is not going to know the real story of my business until he’s been
down in the trenches for some time – if ever. And that jargon also says “I use metaphors: therefore I am capable of thinking outside the box” – when in fact the very opposite is true. You can’t think outside the box, kid, because you don’t even know you’re in a box – and your language is in fact part of the walls of the box. You are the embodiment of anticreativity. Now I am willing to make exceptions. I hear corporate jargon from grizzled professionals, I’m willing to cut them some slack (even if it grates a little inside): they genuinely know what it means. But if I come across someone who hasn’t been in the business five minutes shooting out metaphors like they’ve been doing it a lifetime, they’re dead to me. Period. You’ve never lifted and shifted anything in your very short life, kid – you’ve just read it in a white paper while you were dreaming of your Ferrari and your penthouse in Vegas. So shut up and let the real professionals get on with the job.
Howard Beale
Would you like to contribute an interesting, provocative – and, if you wish, anonymous – piece to The Last Word? Or would you like to respond to this particular column? Why not drop a line to the editor at jamie.liddell@ outsourcemagazine. co.uk to discuss your thoughts?
Consendre mod “Ours isalit luptati sisisisit augait num iusti language, we haveel eraestrud exerat principles, cor ing eumsandre ex elit eugait the age of substitutes: instead of facidunt ipsumsan jargon: instead of ad onulla slogans: atetue tet ulla feu feum niamconEm ea commodiam ad tem dolortio Utat lum- quisim et, quissi.Volobore m iurero dolobore. and, instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas.” Eric Bentley
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Outsource Issue 22
Outsource Issue 22
Table of Contents
Shutting the Door?
Q&A: Deborah Kops
Colombia
LPO
Editorial Board Roundtable
Head-to-Head
HR Trends
Long Live AMS!
The Provider Perspective
Platforms Make Sense in the Cloud!
NOA Pathway
Case Study: Kingâs College Hospital
Egypt
Silver Lining
Roundtable Write-Up
Case Study: Nokia & Hyphen
Alan Leaman
Leah Cooper
Kay Formanek
Paul Awcock
News & Comment
The Legal View
NOA Roundup
Online Roundup
Letter to the CEO
Letters to the Editor
Sourcebites
Inside Source
The Last Word
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