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.

Wordista

A Wordista is one of the business worker archetypes. He (for it is usually a he) is the person in the office least in love with technology, and therefore least given to embrace it. Wordistas get away with as little technology as possible and restrict themselves, wherever possible, to Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word, preferably accessed by means of a dictaphone or, even better, a minute secretary.

Wordistas are likely to struggle with the simpler technological tasks, and may be identified by telltale forensic evidence around their workstations: a dictaphone, a quill, Tipex, almanacs, gazettes and so on. Wordistas can be heard to wonder and marvel at the "forward" and "back" buttons on Internet Explorer when shown them by co-workers. They would have no idea what Chrome even was.

A Wordista is thus usually a lawyer, wears a jacket and tie at all times (including weekends), and tends to lament the passing of outmoded technologies, conventions and means (and modes) of communication. Such as the fax. Wordistas are by disposition anal, enjoy arguing the toss about issues of no significance, employ needlessly verbose expressions and, thanks to this cluster of tendencies, are responsible for more than their fair share of anal paradoxes.

Wordistas in one form another form most of the world's population. They are a silent majority - the planet's plodders, resentful in particular of middle managers who through dexterous use of technology like Microsoft PowerPoint and a facility for obfuscation and confusion, advance themselves more deftly through the organisational ecosystem. Wordistas see middle managers for what they are: the cuckoos of the business world.

Therefore, notwithstanding Microsoft Word's extreme cleverness and its brilliant functionality and integration, it is used by most of the world as a glorified typewriter, where even use of paragraph formatting passes for sophistication.

A proper Wordista relies to an extraordinary degree on a good secretary for clerical support, personal organisation and frequently nutritional sustenance and help with basic bodily functions. Supremely loyal to her principal, a Wordista's secretary has no more interest in, or use for, the functionality embedded in word than does her principal and will eschew (mostly through studied ignorance) facilities such as auto-numbering and page breaks, preferring to hammer away repeatedly on the carriage return and or spacebar for any "clever" formatting.

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. 

Microsoft Word

Microsoft word is the "home application" for those billions of people in the world who don't really like software applications but are forced, by the need to put food on the table, to use them. Microsoft Word is therefore the personification of a necessary evil, and in the business world its adherents make up the smallest of the lost tribes of Microsoft. 

A paradox associated with Microsoft Word is that, no matter how clever it becomes, (and these days it's pretty clever - I mean, they've even got the auto-numbering to work) 80% of the people who use it aren't up to anything smarter than changing the font size, so its functionality goes untouched. These are the same people who hit the return key fifty times to get to a new page, would consider entering a manual page break to be incredibly smart and can't even conceive of the idea that you could build a page break into a paragraph style, largely because they can't conceive of the idea of a "paragraph style" at all.

In the business world, the sorts of people who belong to the "Microsoft word" tribe tend to reside in the legal department. They would never use Excel, even if their lives depended on it, and are innately (and correctly) suspicious of anyone bearing a PowerPoint presentation, and anything contained in it.