Apparently not enough to have someone answer it.
The one that really bothers me: “Best practices”.
As in “We’ll need you to use best practices to accomplish this challenge.”
Well, dang, I was going to do a really sloppy job and half-ass the thing, but if you insist. 
I mean, does this really need to be stated at all? I had a few applicants who had this phrase on their resumé and while I didn’t hire them, I did suggest they take that off their documents because most employers realize that everyone did their best using what they know.
“Best Practices” infers a formal process of evaluating past projects, determining what was learned, and integrating those lessons into future projects. On the whole, we do that informally, but “Best Practices” means more than just ‘everybody doing their own individual best using their own knowledge’.
You can certainly argue whether that formal process has value, but if somebody has experience in working with such a process it is a discrete skill and does not simply mean, “I do a good job.”
That doesn’t always mean the term is used in a non-buzzwordy way. This is true for many corporate buzz words: They originally had some actual useful meaning, but then get diluted by overuse and misuse to mean nothing at all.
This is cut-and-paste verbatim from a company-wide email sent today. This explains our ongoing “digital transformation”.
In order to achieve this vision, every part of our company will have an important role in accelerating our digital implementation, evolving our digital culture and driving value and capability into the business.
No, additional context does not improve it at all, but it does give us:
This new structure will help fuel our company’s next chapter
A chapter takes fuel now?
.
I think the company is giving someone the digit.
Indeed - in many cases, ‘use best practices’ means: don’t try to cook up your own solution to the [solved] problem - apply an already documented and tested solution.
Security response plans, for example - you could figure out what you plan to do when there is a security breach, and you might possibly think of everything relevant, or you can start with a best practice framework that other people have already proven and refined by getting it both right and wrong. In my experience, it’s better not to reinvent the wheel every time you want a wheel.
This new structure will help fuel our company’s next chapter
I believe it was the poet Heine who said “First they burn books, then they burn people”
Can we include a general dislike of mission statements? I’m all for expressing the aspirations of a company into a single motto or brief phrase. (Medical version: Best Care Anywhere).
I am a little more skeptical of recruiting large groups into forming a bloated page of prose, though supposedly “each individual is personally involved with it and thus bound to this bloated thing which says nothing”…
(Medical version: The objectives of our health care providers include maximizing the utility of every health care interaction for the unalloyed benefit of patients and stakeholders. We are committed to delivering an exceptional experience fully synthesizing our core values of compassion, commitment, communication, competence and chameleon-like ability to hide from patients in the coffee lounge.)
Terry Pratchett’s early book Eric is not highly rated by any fans, but I think it did have a decent send-up of corporate mission statements.
In the last scene (if that’s the right term for a book), the senior demon in Hell is congratulated by his underlings for his long overdue promotion to senior management – too absurd for words, under the circumstances. As may be, they show him into his new office, complete with all the symbols of status and power. And there, glory be, is an easel with marker pens. The senior demon is ecstatic, because he knows in his heart that what Hell really needs is a mission statement. But where to start? Ah. He picks up the marker and writes “WE ARE IN THE DAMNATION BUSINESS.” Indeed.
It will likely be a few millenia before he fully figures out that they’ve locked him in the room.
I was going to post nouning of verbs and verbing of nouns.
TL/DR: We had software that wouldn’t accept your documents unless you used approved verbs.
Our college bought into this complicated software suite, that was supposed to share a class syllabus and curriculum across the entire college (and college systems, state-and nation-wide).
You were SUPPOSED to write your curriculum in the software, but that was nearly impossible. So the college had us spend weeks writing and meeting with other teachers and deans editing/revising our curriculum. Then try to make it fit within the software. Well… no. That never once worked the first dozen times. For anyone. Because the software would only accept certain verbs…
…and there WAS NO LIST of verbs that would work.
And no one would admit that this was a problem, because all the Deans had gone to specialized training, and the department heads had gone on a cool lakeside retreat and they’d all drunk the Flavor-Aid™, and we had mandatory training/cheerleading sessions.
We had to input our work at LTWs (“lunchtime training workshops”), and the asst. deans would stand behind you tsk’ing as you tried to make the software work using normal English: “Tsk, tsk, it’s not accepting paragraphs 13 through 18. You really need to use more forceful, probably more focused, verbs.”
Another failure of the system was that there was no accountability, so no one noticed that I’d stopped going to the ETWs (“evening training workshops”), and none of my classes were in the system.
This sounds batshit insane to me. I know you said there’s no list of acceptable verbs, but can you give us an inkling of what sort of verbs they seemed to be encouraging or discouraging?
This is right up there with password-strength validation that only says “nope, you can’t use that password, try another one. Oh, you need a special character. Oh, but it can’t be punctuation, that’s not special enough. And you need to guess the max password length, it’s somewhere between 8 and 64 characters, good luck.”
I hate that shit with a passion.
My firm does this. We’re required to change our passwords at certain intervals (I think it’s every 60 days). It’s very, very hard to come up with a password that will be accepted, because not only does the system incorporate all the rules you mention, and probably some others that I don’t even know about, it has a requirement that the password must in some mysterious way be in accord with the history of all the passwords you’ve ever used.
I get not being allowed to re-use passwords. That makes absolute sense. But this history thing is nuts, although I sort of understand the reasoning behind it. If someone were to sit down at your computer (say you’d gone to get some coffee or to the rest room and left your computer unlocked, which you’re not supposed to do but everyone does) and try to change the password so that they gained control of your account and entry into the system, they’d have to know your previous passwords to succeed.
Still, it’s insane. Nobody knows the rules, and those who do aren’t telling. It takes a bunch of tries to come up with an acceptable password.
If true, this indicates extremely bad security practices. The system should not under any circumstances know if your new password is ‘similar’ to an old password, because that means it knows what your old password was. It should not know this. Passwords should be irreversibly hashed before storing. It could tell you, “No, you’ve used BarfH39 as a password already, you can’t use it again” but it should not be able to tell you, “All your previous passwords included the word ‘Barf’ so the new one must too.” That should be impossible.
Interesting.
It does, where I work. Your new password must have some degree of similarity or dissimilarity to your previous passwords. I don’t know (nobody knows) what the exact rules are. We are explicitly told that there are history requirements (although not what those requirements are) for a new password.
I’ve gotta ask about this. I’m in the IT department too, although not in an area that has anything to do with passwords or security in general. So I know who to ask.
I’ve been racking my brain to remember specifics, but there’s a gap there. I honestly think I blocked out almost the entire process.
I do remember getting frustrated when the proctor said “Well, try utilizing more action verbs.”
So I wrote:
Success in this course outcome will be consummated when students have eviscerated the concepts, cleaving them in twain with the blade of vengeance.
Did it work?
I’d take the hell out of a course that had that in the syllabus.
Our current corporate communications have all been about aligning our structure so that we can be a world class organization. I don’t understand how we are “aligning” our “structure” but it usually means a lot of people are leaving their current jobs for different jobs and that means I have to do things differently now. Sometimes that’s good. But mostly it just means things are harder now.
In the sense that it got me to retire earlier than planned, yeah…
I use this personally. It perfectly describes what I mean. “I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to deal with that right now.”