The “lady” is Lindsay Neagle IIRC, Springfields resident high powered corporate woman (who seems to have a different job evey episode). You forgot the best part of that exchange:
Lindsy: “Poochie will be the original dog from hell”
Writer: “…you mean Cerberus?”
Anyway, no one says paradigm, synergy or proactive anymore because the terms have essentially become overused and cliche to the point of being effectively meaningless (even though they do have specific relevant meanings when used properly). At my last job, we used to actually have betting pools as to when various cliched businessisms would be uttered during all-hands management meetings. You pick a term like “intellectual capital”, “strategic landscape” or “marketing footprint” and whatever term is said first, second and third wins.
I understand a paradigm shift to be when you look at how you used to think about things, realize that it isn’t working/appropriate any longer due to changing circumstances, and devise a new way of looking at things that is more fitting to the current circumstances. When I learned what a paradigm shift was, I was kinda pissed at all the corporate nimrods using it as a buzzword; it is an excellent, useful concept.
It was a biggie where I worked in the 80’s. Lots of corpspeak was.
My biggest issue with the use of the word was the dweeb who made the most noise with it. He was forever looking up such terms wherever they were floating to the top in journals, trade mags, etc. Amazingly, he had such clout with the big boys whose main paradigm was “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” that they hopped on the Paradigm Shift paradigm to get away from the archaic “mind set” concept and started looking to the dweeb for more ways to sound impressive to buyers and visiting dignitaries who were really more interested in where they could find some cheap pussy.
Businessisms or consultingspeak also had a resurgance in the 90s as the “consulting” industry took off in the form of companies like Accenture, Razorfish, Viant and so on and thousands of young dot-com workers were introduced to a bizarre corporate reality that seemed to actually work for awhile.
My old frim used to speak that crap in every-day language:
bio break = take a shit/piss
capture = write down
deck = Powerpoint presentation
bandwidth = time required to do something
your “plate” = stuff your supposed to be working on (ie I have too much on my plate)
etc etc
I believe this hits the crux of the matter. Paradigms imply (to me at least) long-held opinions, rules even, of the correct way of dealing with problems, issues, new data, popular persuasions, etc.
I’d hazard that the Science vs. Religion way of dealing with The Big Picture has been raging for at least three centuries, and some might say for 20 or more.
Once you narrow the scope to the Scientific Method (where the term appears to have originated) things get less fuzzy but at least as camp-oriented as Newtonian vs. Einsteinian vs. Hawkingian vs. the latest rage. In my lifetime the Big Bang got elevated to The Way after competing with Steady State while I was in college.
But when you drag a hifalutin term into Business ways of thinking, your best result with be comic, and may even approach Preposterous.
It’s analogous to the military speak in sports and politics. Wimps trying to sound smart and tough.
> That term was big in the 80s? I read it for the first time in Jurassic Park in 1990,
> and I figured it was new because Crichton went to the trouble of explaining
> what it means in detail, like it was a rare, high-fallutin’ mathematical thing.
Michael Crichton’s grasp of science has always been fairly tenuous, despite the fact that he graduated from medical school. Any science used in his novels consistently sounded to me like he was struggling (not quite successfully) to remember a news story about some hot scientific topic that he’d read five years before. I wouldn’t be surprised if he does the same thing with the business concepts he mentions in his books too. He probably read an article about new management techniques in about 1985 that used the word “paradigm shift” and stored away the word until mentioning it in 1990. He probably didn’t know or care that Thomas Kuhn created the concept in 1962.
