I forgot to mention the thing that seems to have appeared over the last six months or so - particularly from US based organisations - something that REALLY gets me reaching for the Uzi.
There are lots of these "business-speak" expressions you hear about the place that have various amounts of nonsensicalness built into them, and that a lot of folk complain about. "Going forward" is one that everyone mentions. Nobody "brainstorms" any more, they have "blue sky" sessions and "idea showers"...
To be honest I don't really mind most of them. Talk how you want to talk and I'll talk the fucking way I want to...sorta, but I started to hear this new one a while back. The first time I heard it I thought the guy was trying to be ironic or something, but then other people started with it too, and I realized they were actually being serious.
I was following up (actually complaining) to a supplier who hadn't come back to me with an answer and the guy on the other end of the phone said to me "sure - I reached out to him and am waiting for a response"...
WTF...?
Then a tech support guy mentioned how he'd "reached out" to the manufacturer for help...what are you talking about, for Christ's sake?
You reached out???
We're still having difficulty with some L1 Identity fingerprint readers (Bioscrypt to the traditionalists). We're using them on Lenel OnGuard in one to one mode, and they keep randomly locking up. You present the card, the light goes orange ready for you to present a finger, you get a biometric mismatch error then they just lock up. You have to cycle the power to get them back. We've played with them a lot and talked to Lenel a lot and now (because we bought the damned things through Lenel) we're talking to L1 through Lenel. They're blaming grounding or "magnetic field"...which I'm somewhat skeptical about.
One of their suggested solutions (!) was that we connect the power to the reader via a relay and cycle the power automatically like once an hour!!! That's their solution to a fundamentally unstable product? Ok...yeah...
I'm not an enormous fan of HID (another day's tale I suppose) but we've used their biometric readers and...well...they work. I want to get an i-EVO reader to play with. I want to "reach out" to it underwater wearing a latex glove and see for myself if it really does work the way they say it does.
My new boss used to say "Cost neutral" all the time for any spend that he could see complete ROI on. But it was said in every meeting...
ReplyDeleteObviously this was the buzz word that they all used at his old company. Luckily he stopped after a few weeks.
Americanisms creep into everyday business conversations and sometimes they're classics. I was told by a US colleague on a large conf call once that I was 'special'. I'm not sure if he was being endearing, sarcastic or he genuinely thought I was special needs! I think probably the latter - some would say he's not wrong on some counts...
I don't dislike so-called Americanisms or business-speak terms unreservedly. I actually think a lot of them are quite good when used in context and conservatively enough that they have impact. They frequently offer a more vivid, imaginative or (even) emotional way of saying something that would be otherwise dry and lacking of any real impact.
ReplyDeleteI can see where you might use the term "cost neutral" to emphasize a particular viewpoint where the audience is thinking specifically about "cost". You need to use the same term they're thinking about so that what you say resonates with them, and "neutral" is a very...neutral sort of a word. It could work...but I wouldn't want to use it every time I picked up a complementary cup of coffee...
Can't say anyone's told me I'm special though...well, not to my face anyway (although I did have the job title "Special Projects Engineer" once...maybe that's what they meant...).
I'm always trying to think of new job titles to fill in the gaps between the junior people, the less junior people and the senior people. Maybe I'll start grading on "specialness"
Everyone new here is now a 'specialist'. It's the new must have job title.
ReplyDeleteWe have L2 Support Specialists, Oracle Implementation Specialists, Financial Accounting Specialists, Implementation Product Specialists, Product Specialists...
We're all special I guess...
We have "systems specialists", but that's not the same. I think I'm going to create a new grade for "Special Systems Specialists".
ReplyDeleteWe have only a couple of people with the word "manager" in their titles. We'll phase them out altogether soon. Soon as someone gets the "M" word in their title they suddenly think they're too important to do any work.
Customers have a hard time getting their heads around this concept. They ask "who will be my Project Manager?" and they can't understand when we explain that we don't have any. You'll get a Project Leader and if you come into the office you can talk to our Project Coordinators. We even have Project Engineers, but when it comes to the management of our projects we don't rely on any one person. Projects are too important to do something so wreckless. When we start a project we make sure that there's a whole team of people involved and that they all know what is happening all of the time. We'll appoint a Project Leader and he'll come along to all the meetings, but generally each PL looks after more than one project and if the one previously assigned to you is not available we'll send another. It doesn't hurt. The system makes sure that they all know what's happening.
There are hell of a lot of extremely highly paid Western expats who get call themselves "Project Managers" are just expose the project to enormouse risk without actually contributing a whole lot to the end result. That's not exclusively the case, but it's so common that we opt not to take that chance any more.
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ReplyDeleteHah - I just had my 1st US business email with the words, "I need to reach out to [suppliers name] from corporate."
ReplyDeleteRight you are.... You mean contact them. Ok...
Stupid Blogger didn't like text in arrow brackets and deleted it...
I do not make these things up
ReplyDelete