“Everything is high priority.”
Seriously, I had one job where the task/issue prioritization was so broken that anything listed as low priority would never get done. Ever.
I should tell you the context, so you can get a flavour of how annoying it was … I’m a lawyer working in a large national law firm, and one day we were told that we absolutely had to be at a meeting, cancel everything else scheduled for that time-slot, that all of the local lawfirms would be hooking up via teleconference for an important announcement … which turned out to be all about the initiation of a firmwide “core values” policy. Hence, “we have launched the ship of core values”.
This a new one that I learned over the last year. Basically a group of people who probably have private offices decided that our cubicles were too big. In other words they want to stick us all in shoe boxes so they can cram more people into the same space. When I asked one of the clipboard people about it the woman actually said she was trying to "Maximize Employee Density."
I just thought of two others… when business people try to sound tough and ferocious. I can imagine a Rambo type person coming in our building and laughing at things like a conference room with the words “War Room” written on it, or the banner I see when I come in that says “Ruthless Execution! - Team Fusion.” :rolleyes:
ISO 9000 and its IT-specific case ISO 9001 are so overused, anybody who says the term should be IMMEDIATELY challenged to state in plain language what they REALLY mean. And if they hesitiate, poke them with the soft pillows!
Are you kiddin? They’d bruise!
Proven practices
Two that have been grating on me of late are the use of “ask” as a noun and “dialog” as a verb.
“Position” as a verb has been used quite a lot around here (I know Webster’s says it’s okay, but it still sounds kinda silly).
Ever since the latest round of layoffs, there’s been many uses of the terms “revenue-driving” and “cross-functional.”
The person I mentioned in my earlier post tried to use “circle the wagons” for something or other, but it came out as “circle the wagon.” Not sure what that connotes (the idea of a circling wagon seems to be neither revenue-driving nor cross-functional).
She’s also fond of calling some of our fellow employees (product managers, mostly, all of whom are known to all of us on a first-name basis) “critical stakeholders.”
Oh, and you don’t call or e-mail someone with a quick question – you “ping” them. WTF ever.
“Learning” as a noun. Why would you ever have a meeting to “find out what we have learned” when you can have a meeting to “identify the learnings we can take from this project”?
I keep getting asked to identify cross-functional touch points.
But I will always have fond memories of a plastic card given to a friend of mine by her employers with the company’s core values on it. One of them was the company’s aim to “capitalise on discontinuous change with an intense sense of urgency”.
Maybe she just watched Blazing Saddles.
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