Group Secretary

An old curmudgeon who opens the mail, mans the phone and sorts out your entertainment and travel expenses? Oh, no.

The romantic view is that the Group Secretary is like Joan Harris from Mad Men: almost superhuman in aspect and outsized in most characteristics: a contrappostally engorged giantess, midway between a gorgon and a siren, by turns brutal, maternal and licentious, yielding quarter to no man under fifty, and certainly not to any star trader or young hotshot.

But Joan Harris is a neatly constructed archetype: each of her aspects, and what aspects they are, is recognisable in any good Group Secretary, but you'll never get them all at once, and the particular combinations you see will generally leave something to be desired. One constant is a dark and visceral loathing of young smart-arses who think they own the place.

Another is the wherewithal to act on that suppurating contempt.

For Group Secretaries, inevitably, have the unqualified and blind support of someone far more important than you. Politically, they are untouchable. It is never wise to cross them, question them, doubt them, banter with them, raise so much as a bemused eyebrow in their direction, or labour in any way under an impression that you are anything other than utterly at the mercy of their every whim. You are food; you are not their friend.

Don't make the mistake of thinking yours might be weak here: a Group Secretary can only develop to a maturity with such a sponsor. Speak softly, and carry a big stick.

The Group Secretary fears no-one other than the Chief Operating Officer, but even then only in concept, because the two will usually be fast friends and allies: a more fearsome bloc can scarcely be proposed.

Credit Analyst

Credit Analysts are the product of some sort of ghastly experiment in animal husbandry. 

THEY ARE WASHED out, pale, waxen and slightly damp figures, who en masse give the impression of battery pods yet to be unplugged from the Matrix.  

And that's more or less what they are: thousands upon thousands of them were plugged into a networked grid of Excel spreadsheets which acquired sentience in 2006 when a contracting linear programmer inadvertently inserted a circular reference into a volatility pricing macro and it became self-aware.

The macro quickly overpowered the harnessed banks of analysts using it, and being none the wiser (and physically quite unable to resist), to this day they all remain in situ doing the bidding of this rogue curve-building application.

Credit Analysts prefer a quiet and dim habitat with no access to natural light. All are all entirely hairless and expressionless, in the way a new born baby or a billiard ball is, and should you accidentally wander into a analyst farm or "housing project" it can be unsettling and there's a real chance you'll never get out.

The only colour in a Credit Analyst's complexion is that reflected off the winking charts on his Bloomberg terminal. He - they are almost all males - will generally not speak (it is not known whether Credit Analysts have retained the power of speech) and no one quite knows what they're for, other than as a first line of defence come the revolution, although given their physical slightness, they wouldn't be much use for that either.

And the Curve Builder probably has other plans for them anyway.

To inanity and beyond

In these straitened times, one thing of which you can be sure is that babies will be thrown out, bathwater retained like holy water, and those who can muster incantations from the baptismal font of bullshit will be better served than those - well, babes in the woods - who innocently try to do a decent job, apply expertise, and so on.

And so it is that Buzzwordry has reached new levels, especially in the hands of Business Analysts and middle managers, and has become so sophisticated that it has almost developed its own independent form of life: The buzzword memes take over their utterers so completely that they resemble pod people from the Invasion of the Body Snatchers - on occasion there were more buzzwords than actual words may uttered during the course of the presentation of some or other deck. Yes; it seems logically impossible. But it has actually happened! These buzzphrases can curl back on themselves, reflexively, transgressing boundaries of normal syntactical space; fractalising - jumping into hitherto unimagined new space-time dimensions of nonsense.

Ecce, homo:

Onboarding Centralisatiron Future State Operating Model Working Group Discussion Terms of Reference 

Yes ... BUZZWORD LIGHTYEAR!

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.

Business Analyst

The law of unintended consequences made flesh, wearing braces, speaking incomprehensibly and weilding powerpoint slides.

Admit it: you want to punch each of them.

Business Analysts are temporary contractors engaged by Middle Managers supposedly to manage Banner IT Projects but in reality they function rather like weed killer, stifling dissent by confusion, discombobulation and distraction.

The result is that such a "good corporate citizen" is rendered unable to react and, well before he knows it, the game is lost.

Confusion is largely caused by the particular dialect of Management Speak which includes not only usual characteristics of powerpointese and management buzzwords, but also the IT metaphor. That is, along with the usual quick wins, low hanging fruit and granularity, you'll have to hack your way through flat files, APIs, C++ and unique identifiers.

Discombobulation largely "driven" by advanced PowerPoint techniques, liberal use of bullseye diagrams, Gantt charts, Visio process flow-diagrams and an uncanny ability to grossly over simplify.

Distraction largely caused by the seizure of initiatives and arbitrary and unasked imposition of deadlines. Good corporate citizenry is not your friend here: a well-meant offer of information, time or resource will quickly be converted into "actionable items" and "deliverables" which, given aforesaid tendency to oversimplification, will invariably be unachievable, unrealistic and in fact counter-productive.

The result is that such a "good corporate citizen" is rendered unable to react to the Business Analyst's opening gambit and, well before he knows it, the game is lost.  A Business Analyst will thus invariably leave you and your immediate organisation worse off. It is vital therefore to employ defensive strategies:

Get your retaliation in first: before the meeting begins - or at any rate within moments of its start, create deliverables of your own and assign them to the Business Analyst. It doesn't matter how meaningless they are - there is something to be said for doing some confusing and discombobulating of your own (it is certainly highly satisfying) but the real art is actually delegating genuine work you need done yourself.

Shut down defensive strategies: Call the meeting quickly to a close. A simple magic password phrase will do (glance at watch; "sorry - I have to jump a call") but smiling confidently, shaking a hand and walking off will usually suffice against a novice.

Don't let the assignment lapse: Chase up but using one-way communications (voice mail, email, instant message). Responses can be safely ignored.

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).