10 of the worst examples of management-speak
Only if you have the core competencies will you be able to action the key deliverables ... Steven Poole drills down into the strangled vocabulary of office jargon.
Blue sky thinking? Photograph: i love images/Alamy
Among the most spirit-sapping indignities of office life is the relentless battering of workers' ears by the strangled vocabulary of management-speak. It might even seem to some innocent souls as though all you need to do to acquire a high-level job is to learn its stultifying jargon. Bureaucratese is a maddeningly viral kind of Unspeak engineered to deflect blame, complicate simple ideas, obscure problems, and perpetuate power relations. Here are some of its most dismaying manifestations.
1 Going forward
Top of many people's hate list is this now-venerable way of saying "from now on" or "in future". It has the rhetorical virtue of wiping clean the slate of the past (perhaps because "mistakes were made"), and implying a kind of thrustingly strategic progress, even though none is likely to be made as long as the working day is made up of funereal meetings where people say things like "going forward".
2 Drill down
Far be it from me to suggest that managers prefer metaphors that evoke huge pieces of phallic machinery, but why else say "drill down" when you just mean "look at in detail"?
3 Action
Some people despise verbings (where a noun begins to be used as a verb) on principle, though who knows what they say instead of "texting". In his Dictionary of Weasel Words, the doyen of management-jargon mockery Don Watson defines "to action" simply as "do". This is not quite right, but "action" can probably always be replaced with a more specific verb, such as "reply" or "fulfil", even if they sound less excitingly action-y. The less said of the mouth-full-of-pebbles construction "actionables", the better.
4 End of play
The curious strain of kiddy-talk in bureaucratese perhaps stems from a hope that infantilised workers are more docile. A manager who tells you to do something "by end of play" – in other words, today – is trying to hypnotise you into thinking you are having fun. This is not a game of cricket.
5 Deliver
What you do when you've actioned something. "Delivering" (eg "results") borrows the dynamic, space-traversing connotations of a postal service — perhaps a post-apocalyptic one such as that started by Kevin Costner in The Postman. Inevitably, as with "actionables", we also have "deliverables" ("key deliverables," Don Watson notes thoughtfully, "are the most important ones"), though by this point more sensitive subordinates might be wishing instead for deliverance.
6 Issues
Calling something a "problem" is bound to scare the horses and focus responsibility on the bosses, so let's deploy the counselling-speak of "issues". The critic (and managing editor of the TLS) Robert Pottstranslates "there are some issues around X" as "there is a problem so big that we are scared to even talk about it directly". Though it sounds therapeutically nonjudgmental, "issues" can also be a subtly vicious way to imply personal deficiency. If you have "issues" with a certain proposal, maybe you just need to go away and work on your issues.
7 Leverage
Another verbing, as in the parodic-sounding but deathly real example reported by Robert Potts: "We need to leverage our synergies." Means nothing more than "use" or "exploit", but might be attractive because of the imported glamour from high finance, though that may now be somewhat tarnished. Give me a place to stand and I will move the world, said Archimedes. He didn't say he would leverage the deliverables matrix.
8 Stakeholders
People in the company who are affected by a certain project; also, sometimes, business partners and customers. This term, plump with cheaply bought respect, seems to have infected corporate-speak from New Labour politics, where "stakeholders" were not wooden-spike-wielding vampire hunters but people with an interest (usually financial) in some issue. Business analyst Emma Sheldrick offers some useful translations. "Manage our stakeholders," she explains, means "placate the people who are asking the intelligent questions about why something is being done"; while "Update our stakeholder matrix" really signifies "we need to take off the people who disagree with the task at hand and find some new ones who agree."
9 Competencies
Only if you have the core competencies will you be able to action the key deliverables for your relevant stakeholders going forward. Perhaps "competencies" has displaced "abilities" because of a perceived slight to people with disabilities, and "skills" because that just sounds too elitist. Whatever the reason, its usage graph on Google's Ngram Viewer shoots up from 1990, alarmingly like the graph of global temperature. There is no evading the stylistic devastation it represents.
10 Sunset
An imagistic verbing – "We're going to sunset that project" – that sounds more humane and poetic than "cancel" or "kill". When faced with the choice between calling a spade a spade and cloying euphemism, you know which the bosses will choose.
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