Business Speak

I bloody hate it. Here are my pet peeves:

Elevate. What am I, a lift? This just means asking someone higher up, which leads us to:

The food chain. Nice. This is the sort of thing mentioned by people who rate themselves as sharks or tigers as opposed to plankton. No one would rate themselves as plankton. Even plankton itself, if it had an option, probably wouldn’t rate itself as plankton. People that use ‘the food chain’ often also use:

Cascade. E.g. cascading information up and down ‘the food chain’. (Although usually 'down' as, from what we have seen above, folk who use this like to think of themselves as sharks rather than mere worker plankton.) Whenever I hear the word 'cascade' I wonder what happened to the word ‘tell’? How about ‘distribute’? But people like to cascade information in relation to:

Forward Planning. How can planning be anything other than forward? Backward planning doesn’t really work. I wish I could backward plan not to have drank quite so much on Saturday night but wishing it won’t make the Day of Woe (Sunday) go away. This is also linked in with:

Pre-planning. Please don’t ever go there, either. A plan before the plan? Purlease. Although maybe they are making sure they are:

Sweating the Asset. What a pretty picture this conjures in my mind. A big hairy sweaty ass (arse). Thanks for that. When it comes to assets, people may also think about:

Leverage. For the love of plain speaking, why can’t folk say they are going to ‘use’ or ‘take advantage’ of their contacts as opposed to ‘leveraging’ them? Leverage sounds like something people do with a crow bar. Although when it comes to plain speaking, it appears business speak folk do not have:

Visibility. Used in sentences such as ‘I don’t have visibility of that issue/email/system/thing.’ Actually means ‘I don’t know’. Whenever someone says they don’t have visibility, my head will automatically translate this to mean they know nothing at all about anything. This will be further reinforced if they proceed to:

Speak in abbreviations. WTF?

Any more for any more?