Lol. I’m just pointing out the difference. Corporatespeak bothers me too.
I hate hate HATE all of this jargon that means nothing and solves nothing and accepts responsibility for nothing.
I long for the days when, in the middle of an acrimonious staff meeting, someone (in my office it was usually me, I admit I’m a wuss who just wants everyone to get along) said " shouldn’t we all try to remember that we still have to WORK together after this meeting is over?"…and everyone got all shamefaced and made peace because they were basically decent people who WANTED to work things out?
Ah…the good old days. I miss them.
I see a distinction without difference.
Just for shits’n’giggles, I will have a go at deciphering what this phrase actually means:
“Planning How to Make Your Company More Visible to Prospective Clients”
This is difficult because the buzzmemes are almost devoid of meaning in that context.
Are you being funny? Cause the difference is that one business is not actually growing at all, in spite of producing (and accumulating) profits. Profits and growth are not the same thing.
Our P-iest HB just sent us all an email to let us know that “a client accidently made contact with her car into the building.”
(See, where I come from, we call that driving through a wall. )
“…Unfortunately, one staff member was taken to a local hospital for observation and then released-we hope that no physical injury occurred and that with everyone’s best wishes, the person will be able to back at work soon.”
(So if we wish her ill, we can make her stay away? The power, it is so awesome! And ‘be able to’ what ‘back at work soon?’)
“…To assist, peer critical incident debreifing(sic) support will be provided to members of the (____) team immediately.”
(‘peer critical incident debriefing support’=everyone going out back to what’s left of the parking lot and having a smoke.We only get *professional *critical incident debriefings for layoffs )
This has been a very funny thread. The OP was classic, and the gems that have been strewn in its wake have not disappointed.
The last place I worked, all of this kind of talk came mainly from one guy, and he seemed incapable of speaking in any other way. We used to tease him, offering to “shoot” him an email, and asking him when he was gonna be done with “this bad boy.” He never seemed to cotton to the fact that we were mocking him.
Oh, plus he had a nose exactly like a proboscis monkey. I used to make my desk mate nuts by changing her desktop image to a proboscis monkey (she worked with this guy a lot), and she’d turn eight shades of purple whenever he saw it before she could take it down. He never had a clue.
Since this was bumped, I’m going to echo this question to vibrotronica. Do you really not see the difference between the two examples I posted?
Sixty-eight posts and not one mention of Bullshit Bingo?
Within my little group of programmers, we call them REMFs. I think it comes from the military. Means “rear eschelon mother fuckers”.
I love the Bullshit Bingo card but what the hell is “Low hanging fruit”? Sounds like a personal problem to me.
I think you’ve thoroughly internalized this particular bit of marketing speak. What’s wrong with “reinvesting”–or hell, just “investing”? That’s more descriptive. You grow corn. You reinvest in your business.
But this whole thread is kind of veering in the direction of a “prescriptive/descriptive” debate anyway. New words get coined all the time, and usage of existing words evolves. I can see where “grow” as you want to use it is a metaphor derived from agriculture. An ugly metaphor that tends to obscure rather than illuminate meaning, but a metaphor nonetheless. So go ahead and grow your paradigm 'til your heart’s content.
Low-hanging fruit is easily achieved targets. Corporate organizations exist in a perpetual state of being fresh out of low-hanging fruit, and thus having endless meetings in which the participants avoid being stuck with the responsibility of trying to pick the high-hanging fruit.
But we weren’t discussing the merits of “grow” versus “reinvest”; we were discussing “grow” versus “accumulate,” which are the two terms you used in your earlier post. (I agree with you about using “reinvest” rather than “grow,” by the way.)
And the context in which we were discussing “accumulate” versus “grow” was that of an article I had edited for the magazine I work for. An article which I had read and which you and Weirddave had not, and yet you felt that you knew which word was appropriate. But, as I pointed out earlier, I lost the argument and “grow” ran in the magazine. You had already won this battle before you even fired a shot.
I remember watching the Magnificent Seven on AMC not long ago. After the movie I thought to myself “Wow! now that’s how you leverage diverse value added into a synergistic virtual entity!”
I guess somewhere along the way here, I took a wrong turn and my soul died.