Management Speak

Management Speak is a form of communication which originated in business dialects of English but is now widely believed to have speciated into its own disctinct language, to the point where native English speakers are not necessarily conversant in it and vice versa. There is a theory that one long term consequence of globalisation could be that not English but Management Speak becomes the lingua franca for the developed world.

Syntax: Management speak comprises not just the traditional Roman alphabet but also the lexicon of wingdings, pull outs, bullets and animated transitions available in Management Speak-compatible (and enabling) applications like PowerPoint. The field of cultual linguistics increasingly treats management speak as a creole or pidgin; a jumping-off point from the Indo-European linguistic tradition and the first genuinely novel dialect to emerge since Latin (on which all western European languages are based) developed five thousand years ago. Ironically, Latin is central to management speak, having survived the millenia unadulterated in the loving care of the legal profession. The language and philosophy of PowerPoint is a controversial subject in its own right.

Origins: Management speak grows out of an insecure employee's need to make his own job sound more complex, technical and difficult than it really is. As such it leads to well-recognised phenomena like anti-abbreviation and the anal paradox. This is partly a defensive strategy, but more developed management speakers have used it successfully to promote their own careers beyond their credible end-point. On account of the speciation mentioned above, a management speaker's motivation to make his or her job sound more difficult can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, since nowadays to communicate at all with many middle managers one needs to be a management speaker, and it really is quite an art. Most business workers are to some extent bilingual, and usually carry on in a grim creole, in business and in life generally.

Relationship with Revenue Generation: Studies have shown a reasonably firm inverse relationship between the amount of management speak in a speaker's active vocabulary and the measurable benefit that speaker contributes to an enterprise's bottom line. In other words, the further away a function is from profit generation, the more management speak you should expect to hear.

Middle Manager

Middle managers are office workers who have no purpose in an organisation other than to propagate their own spawn. They tend to be canny survivors. The genus has evolved a number of brilliant evolutionary tricks and extended phenotypes to confound, obfuscate, blur and generally confuse matters in a way which (i) isn't directly attributable to them (though it often leaves other office workers with a vague but unprovable sense that they're responsible) (ii) conceals the fact that, whatever else may be going on, they’re not really helping.

Middle managers communicate (or "dialogue") in their own idiom, known to their own kind as "English", but to everyone else as "management speak". In fact, it is only distantly related to English.

One of the most widely recognised phenotypes of the Middle Manager is PowerPoint which itself has contributed to the evolutionary development and cognitive architecture of management speak. Some theories (such as the business worker archetypes) define a middle manager purely by reference to its use of PowerPoint. Middle managers are also fond of (and much beloved by) Business Analysts.

Middle managers will call themselves many things, but never "middle managers". "Chief of Staff" and "Chief Operating Officer" are common and highly prized titles.

Banner IT Project

A fine principle; a forlorn actuality. "Banner" IT Projects thrill Middle Managers and terrify everyone else. They tend to get described with aspirational adjectives: "Transformational". "Paradigm-Shifting". "Game-Changing". They are usually accompanied by scores of enthusiastic, Power-Point-toting Business Analysts.

Measured against its original terms of reference, there is no such thing as a complete or successful Banner IT Project. Usually they continue in perpetuity and, like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, you just have to live with them. Occasionally they are (finally) implemented, but even then limp along unsatisfactorily without delivering a tenth of their original promise. A successful Banner IT Project is simply one that is not so catastrophic that it doesn't need to be immediately replaced (or worked around using excel spreadsheets, hand-filled forms and a scanner).

Invariably, the more ambitious an IT project is the worse it will be, the more poorly will its accompanying Business Analysts understand the project, the organisation or the basic tenets of human nature needed for the project to be a success, and the more it will cost the organisation in terms of direct expense (hiring Business Analysts and IT licence fees) and indirect expense (otherwise useful employees being diverted, distracted, disenfranchised and ultimately eaten by the project).

Buzzwords

Buzzwords are pet words and phrases, beloved of their employers, resented by everyone else. A significant cause of Management Speak, unchecked (and possibly unwittingly exacerbated) by the best efforts of campaigners such as the Financial Times' Lucy Kellaway to stamp them out.

Buzzwords come in various forms:

Technical buzzwords, while often entirely well-intentioned, are basically meant to make what you do sound hard. They are usually expressions which have no meaning outside the rarified heights of a given profession or calling, and little inside it. Latinisms, commonly found in legal documents, are a good example. Some achieve greatness by ubiquity: mutatis mutandis is employed with uncommon regularity in any contract or letter despite most lawyers having little conception what it means (which turns out to be not so bad, as it doesn't really mean anything). Indeed, Latinisms abound: ceteris paribus, ipso facto, inter alia, prima facie and so on, and provide joy only to those who aren't confident that their own language is capable of expressing concepts of general application. Tiring and pretentious.

"Hip" buzzwords (the inverted commas are important) are phrases that are meant to make what you do sound cool. Well, it's almost too ridiculous for words, isn't it. Would that it were so. But we all know it is true. "Hip" buzzwords are the most commonly encountered and heavily resented forms of buzzword. Because of their inherently transitory nature they tend to be auxiliary buzzwords but some of the more redoubtable examples have made it to core buzzword status.

Some examples:

• "To drill down".
• "To circle the wagons".
• "To sing from the same hymn sheet".
• "blue sky thinking".
• "To cut to the chase".
• Any sporting reference, eg, "we are approaching the end zone", or "who is going to quarterback the hiring process?"

We all do it, or spend a long and bitter career nursing resentful thoughts about undeserved underachievement. It is difficult to expound the common theme which runs through the coinage of successful buzzwordery of this category, but it seems to involve metaphors which invoke the exotic, the romantic, or the masculine (for example the examples cited above call up images of oil prospecting, the wild west and, um, going to church) since, as we all know, the practice of law and finance is perhaps the most dry and emasculating pursuit ever devised, which is why people get paid so much to do it. (It plays into the hands of the preternaturally emasculated, of course, which in turn leads to the Geek Paradox but that is a different story).

Phrases that are meant to be funny: Such as "career-limiting behaviour". What these really demonstrate is how little importance is placed on a developed sense of humour in the financial markets.

The is some convergence of buzzwords across otherwise unrelated disciplines, which suggests some buzzwords have a memetic or evolutionary power which can't be explained purely in terms of the buzzword paradox: For example, almost every sport, no matter how obscure (curling, mountain biking, jetboat racing) or lacking in actual skill or the expenditure of energy (luge riding, ten-pin bowling) as well as your common or garden sports like football and tennis, has devised expressions like "deep", "short", "long", "backhand", "inside", "outside" and "short backward square".

There are advantages and, of course, pitfalls of heavily using buzzwords.

Firstly,the continued prevalence of buzzword can be (only) explained by the strong career-evolutionary advantages they offer to a sophisticated user. Their skilful deployment can at the same time impress, delight, bamboozle and intimidate different sectors of the same audience in a way which is of uniform

 benefit to the speaker, and in this way operate rather like smart bombs in the old video game Defender; accruing maximum points and clearing out all dangerous objects in a single stroke. 

On the other hand, there is a risk of inadvertent double entendre: At the same time, used carelessly or with insufficient acumen they can prove career limiting, embarrassing and lame. A buzzword is a form of dead (or at least terminally ill) metaphor, and involves assigning a novel meaning to a word or phrase in conventional use in another (usually more exotic) context. As such, buzzwords share many characteristics with double entendres, which also involve assigning a novel (naughty) meaning to a commonly used phrase. Many of the contexts from which buzzwords are appropriated are specifically masculine endeavours, and this raises the risk of inadvertent double entendre. One needs to be careful, for example, into what (and especially whom) one offers to drill down.

There are also hidden dangers in using Compound Buzzwords which, if not carefully managed, may lead to embarrassingly mixed metaphors.

The lost tribes of Microsoft Office

There is a branch of software anthropology which categorises office workers by reference to the Microsoft application through which they understand the world. This provides a fascinating application of Kuhnian paradigm (and Darwinian) theory to office life and software usage.

The theory goes that different individuals, doing different roles, become familiar with - and develop an early dependency on - a different "host" application. For example:

• a legal clerk will mostly use Microsoft Word or Outlook.
• a financial structurer or trader will mostly use Microsoft Excel.
• a salesperson or a middle manager will learn their trade through the prism of Microsoft PowerPoint.

In a relatively short time, this inclination will develop into a full-blown dependency, to the point where the host application plays an active formative role in the worker's intellectual and technical development. As such the dependency will become increasingly hard to de-program (though there are generally accepted methods of doing this) and, in a broader timescale, the worker's thus-formulated needs will formative in the ongoing development of the application: a positive feedback loop of epic proportions).

As a result workers of the different persuasions (or "tribes") will adapt their own "host" applications in extraordinary ways to do their bidding - an Excel wizard will somehow contort a spreadsheet until it functions as a word processor, or a flow diagram generator. Powerpoint experts will communicate with a different vocabulary altogether, and will tend to see almost everything in the world in terms of a Gantt chart.

Needless to say, interesting situations develop when hotly loyal tribal members then interact.

Powerpoint

Microsoft PowerPoint is the market standard software package on which seminar presentations are generated. (a presentation, or "deck", is a particular form of animated document generated in PowerPoint and inflicted on powerless underlings which promises much and delivers little, especially in the hands of a gifted speaker of management speak.)

But you knew that already. More interesting is PowerPoint's central role in the linguistic development of management speak. PowerPoint is, for example, almost solely responsible for development in management speak of a character set comprises not just the traditional Roman alphabet used in Indo-European languages but also the lexicon of wingdings, pull-outs, bullets and animated transitions available in management speak-compatible (and enabling) applications like PowerPoint. This makes management speak sort of like base sixteen to ordinary English's decimal; an illegitimate off-spring of the Indo-European linguistic tradition and the first genuinely new dialect to emerge since the development of Latin five thousand years ago.

Adeptness at PowerPoint, the willingness to tinker around to get snappy slide transitions and the like, is a core skill of an aspiring middle manager (and a quick way to pick up the fundamental syntax of management speak). Those having a black belt in PowerPoint form one of the classic business worker archetypes - the lost tribes of Microsoft Office. 
PowerPoint experts themselves fall into two clans: salespeople on one hand, and middle managers on the other. Their respective uses of PowerPoint are markedly different (though in both cases the chief objective is to obfuscate: Salespeople use PowerPoint to sell things; middle managers use PowerPoint to overwhelm, confuse, distract or otherwise simply justify their own existence.