Ten minutes into virtually every meeting, that’s all I hear. If it’s a telephone conference, it’s down to 5 minutes flat.
Corporate speak has become so innane lately that it’s all I can do to keep from screaming. People don’t talk to communicate anymore. They talk around the subject. They sugarcoat the problems. They talk about talking more about the issues. Conversations are tangential to the topic and every attempt possible is made to avoid actually addressing the crux of the problem. What’s really the crux of the problem? I’ll tell you. It’s that everybody can get into a room and agree that there is a problem and then also collectively agree that something should be done about the problem. Action items are taken back and a week later, everyone will agree that nothing can be done about the problem until upper management makes a decision that the problem needs to be addressed. Upper management won’t and the problem is suddenly not a problem anymore. Problem solved. Except that it isn’t. We just pretend that it is, for a while. Until the next round of hand wringing and committee discussions.
Competence, initiative and ability to make a decision about a course of action seems to be a vanishing skill.
The best part. The part I really love… When somebody actually takes a position and shows initiative, he/she is dragged down and beaten by the rest of the corporate monkeys for trying to make everyone else look bad. That or simply excommunicated from the colony.
I’d just like to thank you, QuickSilver, for reminding me why I never ever want to end up in a corporate office, and thereby ensuring it will not happen.
I mean sure, you’re all cogs in a machine, gears in a watch, whatever. Those metaphors are valid in many respects. But like any society, change is brought about by individuals. Problems are solved by individuals getting in there and getting their hands dirty.
That’s why they brought me in. From almost day one, the monkeys have been doing everything they can to bring me down to their level and beat me with their groupthink experience. I tell ya… some morinings, it’s not worth chewing through the restraining straps.
But for the longest time, I thought it was me. I thought it was clearly something wrong with me and that I simply wasn’t smart enough to understand the deeply complex nature of the problems that required the input of all these “experts”. Sometimes, I’m still not sure I’m right, if only due to the sheer scale of the collective resistance.
I briefly worked amongst the monkeys 15 years ago. I still get my back up when I hear their jargon on television.
You mention not getting to the crux. The more media-savvy have even faked this. They will fix the camera or interviewer with a cold, loan-officer gaze and say in a dead voice: “You need to (more jargon).” A nice, easily digestible chunk of jargon, one from Column A (grow, implement, leverage, realign, synergize) and one from Column B (revenues, cashflow, market position, strategies, synergies).
It’s getting so everybody in a responsible, “serious” job who doesn’t talk like a robot cop talks like this.
See, I love this. I’ve got ADD (with hyperfocus tendencies) and I work in a corporate environment. From when I joined the company almost three years ago, I got the whole rah-rah-our-company-is-great cheerleader routine every day. Then they put me into a position where I started noticing the chinks in the armor.
So now I have the happy duty of going to my divisional manager about once a month with a new flaw I’ve discovered, and I get to watch his eyes roll around in his head. I’m low-level enough so I don’t get invited to the smoke-filled boardrooms/babble sessions; I get to be the thorn in the side. And once I notice a problem, I ask my director about it every week, until I become a burning, itching sensation, and the problem usually gets fixed! Let him deal with the corporate-speak; I’ve got a job to do.
Wow - five minutes for a phone conference? Once I pick up and introduce myself, I’m usually thinking about dinner or a MST3K episode I saw 3 years ago…
QuickSilver, you describe my life. What amazes me about these people is that they think their postmodern, overcapitalized, corporatespeak, trademarked word salad bullshit is going to alter reality; that readjusting a MS Project document is going to change the actual amount of time it takes to perform a task, or that saying “We need to escallate this initiative to the next level” is going to alter the fundamental fact that the concept is physically impossible.
And then there are the two assholes (there’s always two and only two in every meeting) who want to argue over some obscure point of nomenclature, or debate some irrelevent, badly worded clause in the PIDS, or otherwise extend a discussion that should nominally last 20 minutes into a three hour long meeting pissing away half the day for a dozen or more people. If the meeting is large enough, there’s also some nanbob who continually interjects with concerns about how this decision or that “will affect our Six Sigma initiatives” or if it is “in compliance with CMMI Level 5”, or some other time-wasting, soul-sucking corporate “enhancment program” designed only to give executive bobbleheads something to talk about on the golf course.
They’ll be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Hah. They are the revolution. They’ve already got the rest of us up against the wall whenever we need a job or a home or a loan or an education. Which is a lot the same thing.
[peace activist]Hey, man…you’re ruining my trip, dude. Don’t, like, bum me out here. Here, have a drag on the bong; 's some goood Colombian Gold, man. We just need to, like, overthrow…you know, like, the whole…the Man…the System…just like those, uh, like those guys who took that Hearst chick and turned her into a rebel and made them give away all that food and stuff, or them metao…meteor…them weather guys. Yeah, like…what was I saying? Hey, gimme back the pipe; I need another hit.[/peace activist]
When I was actually working corporate (as opposed to state, as I do now), I usually lasted about five minutes into meetings before I fell asleep! It wasn’t about not getting enough sleep the night before. It was about my brain desperately trying to prevent the inevitable turning-to-mush that happens when the buzzwords start flying.
