Where do all the paperclips go?

/ 01 June 2009

Business and career conundrums.
This month, are you on the same page?

Business and career conundrums. This month, are you on the same page?

Do you like to ‘get your ducks in a row’ to enable some ‘blue-sky thinking’? Or perhaps you’re ‘thinking outside the box’ and ‘having a brain dump’. If so, then you have welcomed management speak into your life – and the chances are that you are baffling some people with it and aggravating others.

As the father of advertising, David Ogilvy, once said, ‘Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.’

And it seems he is not alone in disliking the everyday use of jargon. In fact, a 2006 survey for Investors in People found that 54% of employees in the UK regarded management jargon as a source of communication problems, and 37% thought that it made people feel inadequate and resulted in mistrust in the workplace.

The same study showed that 39% of people thought that the use of management jargon showed a lack of confidence. So if you are using it as part of your everyday language, be warned: a hefty 18% think people who use jargon are untrustworthy and may be trying to cover something up.

However, there can be some light relief that comes out of a jargon-filled meeting: buzzword bingo. The game is very simple. Players make a bingo card, but rather than numbers, they use corporate jargon. Each card consists of 40 examples of current business buzzwords. Favourites include: out-of-the-box thinking; incentivise; the big picture; win-win; empower; touch base; square the circle; drill down; heads up; face time; and helicopter view.

At meetings, players tick off these phrases as they emerge from the lips of unsuspecting bosses. The first to complete a row by ticking off five buzzwords is the winner.
So if in a meeting someone shouts ‘House!’ while you are pontificating, it’s unlikely they are referring to the company’s capital investment programme.

Extracted from Where do all the paperclips go?… and 127 other business & career conundrums by Steve Coomber and Marc Woods, published by Capstone, price £9.99