Ownership
We’re constantly taking or giving ownership of vital projects. It would be different if ownership meant that we could just do the project without a series of increasingly useless meetings about the things we may or may not have to take ownership of in order to complete the project we currently have ownership of.
I don’t want to own any of it. I just want to do my damn job and go home.
I hate the change from “Employee Relations” to “Human Resources”.
Historically, resources have been things that companies mined, pumped, altered, and then callously threw away what what was left of.
“Employee Relations” implied that employees were PEOPLE with whom the company related. In the late '80s–early’90s, we became “resources”, just like livestock, ore, and oil. Nobody needs to have a relationship with a mere “unit of production”, aka “resource”; just use it up and buy some more.
I also oppose “Employee Leasing”. It sounds too much like something Abe Lincoln thought he’d outlawed in 1863.
Well, I always found Employee Relations to be pretension title inflation, to begin with. There is a perfectly good word out there that eliminates all that silliness: personnel.
(When I worked on migrating a benefits package, I did notice that the folks in that department used to joke about going out and “mining” for new people to recruit.)
Personnel isn’t really a good title for what we do, though. There’s nothing descriptive in the word. There’s nothing descriptive about Human Resources either. But since HR handles everything about the employee’s relationship with the company, Employee Relations was an accurate moniker. I too lament the change, and I’ve been in ER/HR for a long, long time.
My most hated bit of jargon, and I cannot believe that no one has mentioned this yet, is “ramp up.” What’s wrong with “begin” or “initiate” or “escalate” or “prepare” all of which are words that “ramp up” seems to replace, depending on who says it and what phase of a project they’re in. It leaves a nasty taste in my mouth.
“Due to budget constraints…”
I can actually see a useful meaning to “ownership”. I’ve seen it put to good use in large companies with large projects; everyone is so busy that if a new task comes up the best way to ensure it gets done is to make someone personally responsible for it – i.e. take “ownership” for it. Dunno why we can’t use “responsibility” instead, though.
I can see a use for ownership - but mainly in the negative. It has been my experience that the larger the corporation, the less likely any one individual is to “take ownership” of a problem; people in large corporations have a tendency to hide in the crowd, with no one particular person being entirely responsible for anything. That means that when things go well, no one individual can take the credit, but more importantly when things go badly, there’s no single person to blame.
Another one I hate is when a company (e.g. an HMO) has some massive cost-cutting exercise (e.g. firing half the telephone support staff) then presents it to the consumer with a syrupy “In order to better serve you…” What usually follows is you then get transferred to some massive consolidated central telephone center where you wait on hold for an eternity. I’m not just referring to telephone service centers - I mean the whole thing of cutting costs to save them money, then presenting it as an effort to improve customer service.
www.m-w.com lists ‘incest’ and ‘incant’ as the most likely real words.
Somehow that just makes sense.
“inventivize” - ugh.