I’m surprised ISO-9001 is still a thing. We were doubting its efficacy 20 to 25 years ago here on the Dope (Thread 1, Thread 2).
As I stated in the second thread, a company can make concrete lift preservers and become ISO-9001 certified…
The scope of ISO 9000 has changed quite a bit since those threads appeared. It is far more focused today on risk assessment and continual improvement than documentation. And more and more companies require ISO certification if you want to do business with them. We would lose pretty much all of our biggest customers if we were to let our certification lapse. ISO is not going anywhere.
Sorry for the minor hijack.
The best thing that came out of my old corporate TQM era was that everyone got a pencil that had no eraser and the phrase, “Quality is no Mistake” printed on it.
Trying to cover up the run of pencils that didn’t get erasers, right?
We’ll run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.
Lest us middle management* types ever forget: before we got to ask AI to write vague buzz-word laden presentations, we had the bullshit generator
* spoiler - I am not middle management, I am a mere peon.
I just with they’d said “Quality is no Misteak”
Hell, let’s put it in the toaster and see if it pops.
In the same sort of area was Dickens’s Circumlocution Office
Or the executives in The Apartment and their obsession with the suffix “-wise.”
Trump has been increasingly ending his posts with “Thank you for your attention to this matter,” no matter how bizarre it sounds in context. A recent example:
“We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. All planes are now outside of Iran air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow. All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Of course it is still around. Who is going to say quality doesn’t matter. I remember Six Sigma (is that still a thing?) which was great for manufacturing, but was applied to things it had no business being applied to.
I remember getting a quality statement from the rental car company we used, hung on the visor. Pretty funny, really.
People who don’t have a clue, but think following the latest in buzzword will give them one.
When I worked at a Bell Labs center that was unclear about our purpose, I spent a lot of time in meetings crafting mission statements. When I moved to Intel no one ever mentioned one. Everyone knew what the mission was, no statement required. At Bell Labs my general manager hired a bunch of change consultants, which led to tons of offsite meetings. (Better than working, and they fed us.) You’ve never heard so many buzzwords. Worked fine until they recommended a direction the manager didn’t like, then they were out on their butts.
I’d be hard-pressed to think of any example where corporate jargon actually clarified anything. I would say that corporate jargon – aka “biz-speak” – has four purposes, only the first of which is legitimate:
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Brevity. “Vertical integration” is easier to say than “involved in all or many of the different stages of production and distribution”.
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Obfuscation, particularly covering up bad news with flowery language.
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Pompous elevation, making business processes sound more complex and sophisticated than they really are. Here’s a great example from James Quincey, the CEO of the Coca Cola company, who was trying to say that because consumers are trying to spend less, the company will be packaging smaller quantities of their product at correspondingly lower prices. What he actually said was “It’s about extending the price ladder, making sure the entry price point becomes as low down in the price spectrum – the actual out-of-pocket – as possible.”
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Establishing in-group identity. Many subcultures develop some unique language variant uniquely their own as a form of group identity.
Of course #3’s example from Coca Cola comes with a side order of obfuscation too. IMO this is really partly a form of shrinkflation. Or at least cynical me expects the new smaller sizes will carry correspondingly higher margins even after you account for the differing ratios of product cost to packaging cost to transport cost as unit sizes shrink or expand.
“Shrinkflation” itself is a type 1 bit of useful business jargon, or at least consumerism jargon. It has a clear direct meaning that would otherwise need a sentence or two to explain.
I think it mostly started with the drive for “qaulity” or “excellence” in the late 70’s and early 80’s. At the time japan was eating America’s lunch, and the focus was on the fact that America produced crap. (And the epitome of that was the Detroit automobile vs. the Japanese auto.)
Following up on this, with books such as Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence there was a massive push in assorted corporations to refine proceses to improve quality. This inevitably led to a flood of mananagement consultants to help corporations acheive this quality - and quality, as in “no rework” was equated with higher profits, so who wouldn’t want to show they were working towards quality and efficiency. Some, like Statistical Process Management, made sense. (address the biggest problems first. Don’t go on impressions, have the numbers to prove it.) Along with these came recommendations on organizing people to better serve these goals. (which resulted in "oh, teams! that means we don;t have to call them mangement, or pay them as such, they’re just “team leaders”.) No surprise this was the rise of the MBA too - “I’m an expert on this stuff, I have the degree!”. However, combine this with a complex bureaucracy, and it became more a matter of performance than results, since nobody was allowed to actually make decisions.
As the management fads grew more intense and stranger, they were essentially performative theatre to show shareholders and investment bankers you were doing your best to be high quality, efficient, and up-to-date. This is when comics like Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) became rich, spoofing how management fads are actually implemented.
Which is a great lesson to teach your kids while they’re young. My parents made the mistake of telling me to work hard and put the job first, and that got me a comfortable career, but didn’t get me promoted. What did was making a concerted effort to cultivate a reputation and be visible.
I’ve been watching the 1960s British show The Prisoner, set in a quaint authoritarian beachside village. Every so often there’s an announcement over the outside loudspeakers, and they always end sweetly with “Thank you for your attention!” So I read the last line of Trump’s post with that sweet but menacing voice.
An example would be “Paradigm shift”, coined in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn to explain scientific revolutions (eg Copernican, germ theory of disease, plate tectonics) and now loved by corporate buzzword purveyors everywhere.
Anyone still going for the Big Hairy Audacious Goals?