I may ne better at corporate bullshit than I thought. I’ve been with this company for eight years and have worked myself up to a position of obscurity in that time
I’m pretty sure you can verb any noun in the language.
Was there some reason you responded to an ‘anonymous’ survey in such a way as to identify yourself?
To respond: I’d like to meet this guy - I hope he is calling your BS - OK, smart guy, let’s see just how well you do at turning a company’s direction.
I really do hope this is your basic, in-your-face “Put Up or Shut Up”.
Are the terms “leverage” (verb) and “synergy” (business operations) still used? I thought those had died of derision in the early 90’s.
Us, too. So what you do is give decent results where you can, and if you have to say something tepid, follow it with a suggestion that would fix it.
NM
Thank Og I work in a strong union state and have tenure, in addition to 27 years seniority. Every time we get email surveys like that I make it a point to tell the Truth. TPTB really don’t like being told that their “bold new strategy for the future of education” has been tried at least 3 times in my time in the district, and it crashed and burned each time, with increasing velocity and collateral damage.
They generally leave me alone to teach my classes the way I see fit and don’t ask me to play with others. 
I sincerely wonder if you work at my company. I have learned much from this thread. I have often answered these surveys honestly. Never again.
When management wants to make a big change, they try to identify the problem people. Then they get the problem people together, like have them form a committee with the assignment on how to implement the new way of thinking. They figure if they can get you cranky types and trouble-makers on-board, then it will make it easy to get the rest to follow. But I have to warn you, if you fail at this task and don’t 100% drink the “kool aid” you aren’t going to be around there for much longer. Management thinks highly of themselves coming up with these new ways of thinking, and if you are labeled as someone who isn’t going along with it, they want you out of there. I have seen this happen in a large corporation and they formed a committee exactly as I described it. Many appeared to fall in line with this, but private continued to mouth-off about things to their co-workers.
We don’t know you, your field and your level of experience, and we certainly don’t know the company. But given what you said, I don’t think it’s a trap, but I don’t say this lightly, I don’t think you are being singled out because the CEO admires you. You mentioned it was an anonymous survey, so I considered that a violation of their own policy and instructions to identify the comment was from you.
What to do. First thing I would do, is update my resume and start looking for another job the evening after I got that e-mail. Meanwhile, I would do my best to play along with this. I would reply that you are enthusiastic about being involved in this new initiative.
You see, things come from the top down in management. And if they decided they are going to tell employees to look at the window and repeat the sky is blue when in reality it is overcast and raining, this is what they want the employees to do and they aren’t interested in hearing anything to the contrary. It’s a sign of bad management doing this in my opinion, and I would want out as soon as possible.
I seriously doubt you are going to come out of this with more respect and trust from management. Sorry to be so cynical, but my comments come from seeing companies failing to management properly and listening to outside consults telling them how to run things. If you have see the movie Office Space, the two characters of The Bobs in that movie is an excellent parody of what I have witnessed.
I agree. The best thing to do, if you can’t avoid from filling them out, is to put in very generic information. Keep it short and say glowing things about everyone and everything.
Why? Because they aren’t really interested in what you have to say unless it’s something bad about the management, and then they go on a witch hunt. Because really good management would bring everyone together in a meeting and discuss what’s on their mind and bounce ideas off people if they really wanted their input.
I know people feel this is their chance to vent about their place of employment, but that’s what places like Glassdoor.com are about and they are anonymous. Much more so than the company survey. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s going to help the company, co-workers and yourself. It will do none of those things. I’ve seen these surveys done, collected by the management consulting company, summarized in a report, and all the negative comments are never put into action items to correct the negative complaints. Either management gives a reply to them how they won’t do anything or explains why the situation is the way it is.
I agree. The comment isn’t anything tactical like “Look both ways before crossing the road”. It has to be tactical otherwise it can’t be directed and measured.
I can’t say how many times I’m happy to work at my company when I read about other companies. Sure, some things don’t change as a result of our annual survey, but a lot of things do change, and we make a lot of efforts every year (starting at my level) to improve scores for the next year.
The downside, though, is that without a scientific basis (although the hunch is probably correct), we attribute the lower than median scores from a particular country to the fact that we’re shutting down most operations there and there isn’t really a future for them. Although it’s probably true, there’s no effort I’ve seen to verify that it’s true.
As I only participate in the improvement teams in my country (they work!), I can’t say what the improvement teams in that part of Oceana are doing, if anything.
If the CEO said “staretgy” then maybe he was joking…
I am so glad I’ve never worked in a setting where I had to deal with this kinda stuff!
He may like me because I also type poorly.
Resistance is not exactly futile, but it *is *pretty much self-defeating.
Leverage our synergies means that if we own a Nuts company and we own a Gum company and all the other competitors in the market only own Nuts or Gum companies, we should put someone on a taskforce to determine whether Nuts 'n Gum would sell. If if did, we would have a product that other companies would have a hard time competing with.
Think what you may of it from a culinary perspective but the Doritos Locos Taco was a huge seller for Taco Bell and resulted in a lot of profit. It was the result of leveraging the synergies between Yum! Brands and PepsiCo (Yum! was spun out of PepsiCo). Similarly, the combination Taco Bell/Pizza Hut/KFC stores that rolled out in the 00’s was a result of Yum! Brands leveraging their synergies. PepsiCo owned all 3 brands for decades before but nobody had thought to leverage this insight into a new restaurant concept until they were put under the same roof by Yum!.
Business language can often be bullshit but it also is a precise technical language, like any other, developed to concisely convey complex terms. Nobody sneers when software engineers say something like “High availability is orthogonal to response time under median load” even though the sentence is equally as incomprehensible to those outside the field.
Could somebody (**edward **included) comment further on this paragraph? Cuz my company is initiating some massive changes never seen before in our company and (separate changes…) that are unprecedented in our industry. They’ve implemented such a committee.
I’m on this committee. I volunteered myself.
Did I just volunteer myself out of a job? :eek: There are massive changes that need to be made – communication is absolutely abysmal, and a recent initiative by our Marketing/Communication dept. highlights that nicely if catastrophically – and I’ve been given to understand that this committee will be part of that.
What’d I get myself into?
Something complex, interesting and likely to face a lot of resistance from the current crop of employees especially if they think it’s a bullshit exercise.
You can sign up and do your best to make it better, quit and find somewhere that might be better, or do nothing and enjoy nothing changing.
In addition to this I suggest changing your middle name to Pierpont - it has a certain ring to it.