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For reasons that make no obvious sense, corporate jargon has had a curious amount of attention lately.
British newspapers reported last week that a study had uncovered a raft of new office buzzwords such as the “negatron”, who is eternally pessimistic; the “faulty tasker”, who multitasks so much they make a mess of everything; and the tedious “meanderthal”, who takes forever to get to the point.
This followed other studies on the most hated or confusing bits of jargon around the world, which showed “move the needle”, “low hanging fruit” and “outside the box” still rank surprisingly highly.
London’s City AM business publication has a “worst corporate jargon of the week” column and social media is awash with mockery of such blather.
Meanderthals aside, there is not very much new here. Office jargon will always be unstoppable because, as I have written before, it makes us feel more secure, more of an insider and more able to tell someone something pronto.
We also, naturally, love to hate corporate guff that deliberately tries to obscure the truth. The world would be a better place if companies stopped saying they were restructuring, streamlining, downsizing or rightsizing when they are in fact sacking people. I doubt they ever will, which raises a more sobering question: tiresome and deceptive as this bilge is, has it now become so pervasive that we do not notice or care about it as much as we did?
Consider the King’s Speech outlining the new Labour government’s plans at the state opening of parliament in London this month.
As an ermine-clad King Charles settled into a gilded throne to address rows of red-robed Lords, he began reading out his government-written speech by declaring: “My government’s legislative programme will be mission-led.”
Mission-led? This makes sense if you know some ministers have been inspired by the economist Mariana Mazzucato, whose Mission Economy book argues moonshot efforts such as the 1960s space programmes can be a model for addressing knotty modern problems.
For most of us though, a mission is carried out by an astronaut, a soldier or an actual religious missionary, which is why it jars when a middle manager starts babbling about a company mission statement or a mission-critical task.
Yet I have become so inured to this stuff that, until a colleague at work mentioned it, I didn’t even notice that King Charles III himself had descended into management-speak.
Likewise, I predict no harm will come to the online travel group Etraveli for a press release it emitted last week that quoted its chief fintech officer talking about a “pivotal” and “robust solution” with a “360 view” that was “provenly managing decisions” to shrink fraud costs. I still have no idea what it is.
More worryingly, Starbucks’ chief executive, Laxman Narasimhan, suffered remarkably little scorn when he unveiled a new corporate strategy at the end of last year called the “Triple Shot Reinvention, with Two Pumps”.
Alas, this exciting plan was followed by weaker than expected earnings, a share price plunge and public criticism from the coffee group’s former leader Howard Schultz.
Schultz himself is no slouch at cringeworthy drivel. My former colleague Lucy Kellaway once called him “a champion in the bullshit space”. But this was back in 2017 when Schultz was still serving up full-strength classics like his claim Starbucks Roasteries were “delivering an immersive, ultra-premium, coffee-forward experience”.
These words sound almost quaint in an era of triple-shot reinvention. Today, a company probably has to go the full Mondelez before anyone bothers to notice.
Mondelez is the snack giant behind Oreo cookies and Ritz crackers and in 2020 it unveiled a new approach to marketing it called “humaning”. “We are no longer marketing to consumers, but creating connections with humans,” it said in a press release that prompted immediate and widespread ridicule.
Humaning shows what happens when you take your eye off corporate twaddle. All manner of idiocy is let loose.
Happily, the term scores a mention in The Friction Project, a recent book by Stanford professors Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao on overcoming petty managers, red tape and other office horrors.
In their section on “jargon monoxide”, they put humaning in the category of “meaningless bullshit”, meaning it is “empty and misleading communication that is meaningless to both bullshitter and bullshittee”. This description is both simple and true. It’s also a reminder of what a joy it would be if all companies could speak so plainly.
pilita.clark@ft.com
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